Is there a reason for the lack of "case" dependency in spacy.symbol?

[jesusfbes]

Hi to all,

We recently found out that there is not a symbol in "spacy.symbol" for some dependencies. For instance "case" dependency. We would like to do operations like the following with case:

for t in doc:
          if t.dep == nsubj:                        # dependency 'nsubj' IS recognized
                 print(f"Found nsub token")

Is there a reason for this? Is there a workaround to solve this in a clean way without using the string and "dep_" attribute?

[qingyun1988]

There is no 'case' in spacy, it is replaced by 'prep' and 'poss'.

[adrianeboyd]

case is a valid dependency label, but this is a separate question about the symbols in spacy.symbols.

[adrianeboyd]

This is more for historical reasons than anything, and whether a string is in spacy.symbols only matters for the symbols in spacy.attrs at this point. We haven't removed any symbols to maintain backwards compatibility, but with the string hashes introduced in spacy v2, many of these symbols aren't really needed anymore.

You should always get the same integer from nlp.vocab.strings["case"] for the label you're interested in, so I wouldn't use spacy.symbols for this. If you want to be sure that you're using valid labels, you can refer to the model's labels (nlp.get_pipe("parser").labels) and convert them to integers with nlp.vocab.strings[label]. All internal integer representations of these strings will correspond to the value you get from the StringStore in nlp.vocab.strings. The same hash function is used across all models, so no matter which pipeline you've loaded, nlp.vocab.strings[label] should always return the same value.

[jesusfbes]

Very clear @adrianeboyd.

Thank you very much for your response.