🤗 Datasets is a lightweight library providing two main features:
one-line dataloaders for many public datasets: one-liners to download and pre-process any of the major public datasets (image datasets, audio datasets, text datasets in 467 languages and dialects, etc.) provided on the HuggingFace Datasets Hub. With a simple command like squad_dataset = load_dataset("squad"), get any of these datasets ready to use in a dataloader for training/evaluating a ML model (Numpy/Pandas/PyTorch/TensorFlow/JAX),
efficient data pre-processing: simple, fast and reproducible data pre-processing for the public datasets as well as your own local datasets in CSV, JSON, text, PNG, JPEG, WAV, MP3, Parquet, etc. With simple commands like processed_dataset = dataset.map(process_example), efficiently prepare the dataset for inspection and ML model evaluation and training.
🤗 Datasets is designed to let the community easily add and share new datasets.
🤗 Datasets has many additional interesting features:
Thrive on large datasets: 🤗 Datasets naturally frees the user from RAM memory limitation, all datasets are memory-mapped using an efficient zero-serialization cost backend (Apache Arrow).
Smart caching: never wait for your data to process several times.
Lightweight and fast with a transparent and pythonic API (multi-processing/caching/memory-mapping).
Built-in interoperability with NumPy, pandas, PyTorch, TensorFlow 2 and JAX.
Native support for audio and image data.
Enable streaming mode to save disk space and start iterating over the dataset immediately.
🤗 Datasets originated from a fork of the awesome TensorFlow Datasets and the HuggingFace team want to deeply thank the TensorFlow Datasets team for building this amazing library. More details on the differences between 🤗 Datasets and tfds can be found in the section Main differences between 🤗 Datasets and tfds.
Installation
With pip
🤗 Datasets can be installed from PyPi and has to be installed in a virtual environment (venv or conda for instance)
pip install datasets
With conda
🤗 Datasets can be installed using conda as follows:
🤗 Datasets is made to be very simple to use - the API is centered around a single function, datasets.load_dataset(dataset_name, **kwargs), that instantiates a dataset.
This library can be used for text/image/audio/etc. datasets. Here is an example to load a text dataset:
Here is a quick example:
from datasets import load_dataset
# Print all the available datasetsfrom huggingface_hub import list_datasets
print([dataset.idfor dataset in list_datasets()])
# Load a dataset and print the first example in the training set
squad_dataset = load_dataset('squad')
print(squad_dataset['train'][0])
# Process the dataset - add a column with the length of the context texts
dataset_with_length = squad_dataset.map(lambda x: {"length": len(x["context"])})
# Process the dataset - tokenize the context texts (using a tokenizer from the 🤗 Transformers library)from transformers import AutoTokenizer
tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained('bert-base-cased')
tokenized_dataset = squad_dataset.map(lambda x: tokenizer(x['context']), batched=True)
If your dataset is bigger than your disk or if you don't want to wait to download the data, you can use streaming:
# If you want to use the dataset immediately and efficiently stream the data as you iterate over the dataset
image_dataset = load_dataset('cifar100', streaming=True)
for example in image_dataset["train"]:
break
If you are familiar with the great TensorFlow Datasets, here are the main differences between 🤗 Datasets and tfds:
the scripts in 🤗 Datasets are not provided within the library but are queried, downloaded/cached and dynamically loaded upon request
the backend serialization of 🤗 Datasets is based on Apache Arrow instead of TF Records and leverage python dataclasses for info and features with some diverging features (we mostly don't do encoding and store the raw data as much as possible in the backend serialization cache).
the user-facing dataset object of 🤗 Datasets is not a tf.data.Dataset but a built-in framework-agnostic dataset class with methods inspired by what we like in tf.data (like a map() method). It basically wraps a memory-mapped Arrow table cache.
Disclaimers
🤗 Datasets may run Python code defined by the dataset authors to parse certain data formats or structures. For security reasons, we ask users to:
check the dataset scripts they're going to run beforehand and
pin the revision of the repositories they use.
If you're a dataset owner and wish to update any part of it (description, citation, license, etc.), or do not want your dataset to be included in the Hugging Face Hub, please get in touch by opening a discussion or a pull request in the Community tab of the dataset page. Thanks for your contribution to the ML community!
BibTeX
If you want to cite our 🤗 Datasets library, you can use our paper:
@inproceedings{lhoest-etal-2021-datasets,
title = "Datasets: A Community Library for Natural Language Processing",
author = "Lhoest, Quentin and
Villanova del Moral, Albert and
Jernite, Yacine and
Thakur, Abhishek and
von Platen, Patrick and
Patil, Suraj and
Chaumond, Julien and
Drame, Mariama and
Plu, Julien and
Tunstall, Lewis and
Davison, Joe and
{\v{S}}a{\v{s}}ko, Mario and
Chhablani, Gunjan and
Malik, Bhavitvya and
Brandeis, Simon and
Le Scao, Teven and
Sanh, Victor and
Xu, Canwen and
Patry, Nicolas and
McMillan-Major, Angelina and
Schmid, Philipp and
Gugger, Sylvain and
Delangue, Cl{\'e}ment and
Matussi{\`e}re, Th{\'e}o and
Debut, Lysandre and
Bekman, Stas and
Cistac, Pierric and
Goehringer, Thibault and
Mustar, Victor and
Lagunas, Fran{\c{c}}ois and
Rush, Alexander and
Wolf, Thomas",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations",
month = nov,
year = "2021",
address = "Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-demo.21",
pages = "175--184",
abstract = "The scale, variety, and quantity of publicly-available NLP datasets has grown rapidly as researchers propose new tasks, larger models, and novel benchmarks. Datasets is a community library for contemporary NLP designed to support this ecosystem. Datasets aims to standardize end-user interfaces, versioning, and documentation, while providing a lightweight front-end that behaves similarly for small datasets as for internet-scale corpora. The design of the library incorporates a distributed, community-driven approach to adding datasets and documenting usage. After a year of development, the library now includes more than 650 unique datasets, has more than 250 contributors, and has helped support a variety of novel cross-dataset research projects and shared tasks. The library is available at https://github.com/huggingface/datasets.",
eprint={2109.02846},
archivePrefix={arXiv},
primaryClass={cs.CL},
}
If you need to cite a specific version of our 🤗 Datasets library for reproducibility, you can use the corresponding version Zenodo DOI from this list.
HuggingFace community-driven open-source library of datasets
We found that datasets demonstrated a healthy version release cadence and project activity because the last version was released less than a year ago.It has 4 open source maintainers collaborating on the project.
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