StanzaSharp 1.0.0

StanzaSharp

Stanza's English NLP pipeline in .NET:

• tokenization and sentence splitting
• multi-word token expansion ("don't" → "do" + "n't")
• part-of-speech tags and morphological features
• lemmas
• dependency parsing
• named entities (OntoNotes types: PERSON, ORG, GPE, DATE, ...)
• constituency parsing
• sentence sentiment (negative, neutral, positive)

It runs Stanza's own pretrained models in plain .NET code, with no Python and no native libraries. The output is identical to Python Stanza 1.15.0 on its golden test data.

Install

dotnet add package StanzaSharp

That is all: the models run on StanzaSharp's managed backend, C# kernels using the CPU's SIMD instructions. On the full pipeline it is about twice as fast as the TorchSharp backend on 8 threads and needs less memory, with the same output.

TorchSharp backend. In its own package since 1.0, StanzaSharp.Cuda (also the way to a GPU, below). Add it and the native libtorch yourself, TorchSharp-cpu (or one platform's libtorch-cpu-<rid> 2.10.0 package; on Windows on Arm64 libtorch-cpu-win-arm64, since TorchSharp-cpu has none), and select it:

using var nlp = Pipeline.Load(dir, new PipelineOptions { Backend = CudaBackend.Cpu });

• Its version must match the TorchSharp version StanzaSharp.Cuda depends on; otherwise the build warns with STANZA001.
• On macOS (Apple Silicon), also run brew install libomp: libtorch loads OpenMP from Homebrew's path.
• <StanzaSharpTrimNative>true</StanzaSharpTrimNative> leaves out the libtorch files StanzaSharp never loads (35 MB on Linux x64, 29 MB on macOS).
• The StanzaSharp.Cpu.* platform packages ended with 0.4; reference TorchSharp-cpu or a libtorch-cpu-<rid> package instead.

Supported platforms

The managed backend runs wherever .NET 10 runs. CI runs it against the golden data on:

Docker: any .NET 10 runtime image works, including the chiseled runtime:10.0-noble-chiseled and runtime:10.0-alpine (publish with -r linux-musl-x64 there): the image needs nothing but the .NET runtime. Mount the models read-only rather than copying them into the image. A sample Dockerfile is in the repository's samples/docker.

Download the models

The models (about 600 MB) come from Stanza's Hugging Face repository. Download them once:

await ModelDownloader.DownloadAsync("models/stanza/en");                            // all, ~600 MB
await ModelDownloader.DownloadAsync("models/stanza/en", "tokenize,mwt,pos,lemma");  // only what these need

Each file is checked against its published MD5, and files already present are kept. Pipeline.Load itself never touches the network.

Command line: the stanzasharp .NET tool (package StanzaSharp.Tool, about 1 MB, no native libraries) downloads them too, e.g. in a Dockerfile or CI:

dotnet tool install -g StanzaSharp.Tool
stanzasharp download models/stanza/en --processors tokenize,mwt,pos,lemma   # --package default_fast for that package

Use

using StanzaSharp;

using var nlp = Pipeline.Load("models/stanza/en");
var doc = nlp.Process("Barack Obama was born in Hawaii. He was elected president in 2008.");

foreach (var sentence in doc.Sentences)
{
    foreach (var word in sentence.Words)
        Console.WriteLine($"{word.Id}\t{word.Text}\t{word.Lemma}\t{word.Upos}\t{word.Feats}\t{word.Head}\t{word.Deprel}");
    Console.WriteLine(sentence.Constituency); // (ROOT (S (NP (NNP Barack) (NNP Obama)) ...))
}

• Pipeline.Load(dir, new PipelineOptions { Processors = "tokenize,mwt" }) runs only the listed processors; each needs the ones before it. The default is all eight, like Stanza's English default: tokenize,mwt,pos,lemma,constituency,depparse,sentiment,ner.
• Add ner to the list for named entities: doc.Entities (text, type, character offsets) and a BIOES tag per token (Token.Ner).
• Add sentiment to the list for sentence.Sentiment: 0 negative, 1 neutral, 2 positive.
• Conllu.Write(doc) gives CoNLL-U in Stanza's format.
• nlp.Process(texts) with any IEnumerable<string> processes many texts at once, like Stanza's bulk_process: one Document per text, much faster for short texts.
• nlp.Process(new[] { new[] { "Hello", "world", "." } }) takes text that is already split into sentences and tokens, like Stanza's tokenize_pretokenized=True.
• Process is thread-safe: share one pipeline between threads. Every overload takes a CancellationToken. One call on a short sentence takes about 28 ms on 8 threads (default_fast: 14 ms). On short texts, about two calls in flight per pipeline give the most throughput; more evict each other's weights from the CPU cache. Set MaxConcurrentCalls = 2 in PipelineOptions to make extra callers wait their turn.
• Memory: a call's peak is set by its largest batch (the tagger pads up to 250 sentences to the longest), so to bound it, call Process on parts of about 1,000 words split at blank lines. The annotations stay the same; with tokenize,mwt,pos,constituency on 15,000 words the peak drops from 1.7 to 1.2 GB for about 15% more time.
• Memory between calls: on the managed backend (the default) the models and the scratch buffers of a call's largest batches stay on the .NET GC heap for the next call, so the working set stays near the call's peak. To give it back when a service goes idle, call GC.Collect(2, GCCollectionMode.Aggressive, blocking: true, compacting: true) a minute or more after the last call (pooled buffers are released only then); the process drops to about its size after loading. On the TorchSharp backend, on Linux (glibc), a call of 1,000 words or more returns the memory it freed to the OS (malloc_trim); on Windows libtorch's allocator keeps it, and the environment variable MIMALLOC_PURGE_DELAY=0, set before libtorch loads, returns it for about 20% more time.
• PipelineOptions:
  • Backend: PipelineBackend.Managed (the default), or CudaBackend.Create() / CudaBackend.Cpu from StanzaSharp.Cuda.
  • Threads: threads per operation, set process-wide at Load: the managed backend's one thread pool (shared by concurrent calls), or libtorch's intra-op threads. By default at most Environment.ProcessorCount, which respects a container's CPU quota.
  • SplitSentences = false: one sentence per paragraph (Stanza's tokenize_no_ssplit).
  • VerifyChecksums: checks the .pt model files against Stanza's MD5s before loading.
  • Logger: an ILogger for load and processing times.
• Processor.Tokenize, ..., Processor.Ner are constants for the processor list.

Faster: the default_fast package

new PipelineOptions { Package = "default_fast" } selects Stanza's default_fast package: no constituency parser, and pos, depparse and ner with their own small character models instead of the large character language models. It is faster and smaller, and its output is identical to Python Stanza's package='default_fast'.

var options = new PipelineOptions { Package = "default_fast" };
await ModelDownloader.DownloadAsync("models/stanza/en", options); // what Load reads with these options
using var nlp = Pipeline.Load("models/stanza/en", options);

GPU

Reference StanzaSharp.Cuda and TorchSharp-cuda-windows (or TorchSharp-cuda-linux), then Pipeline.Load(dir, new PipelineOptions { Backend = CudaBackend.Create(disableTf32: true) }). disableTf32 gives output identical to the CPU by turning TF32 off process-wide; with TF32 on (libtorch's default), a few near-tie decisions can differ. See the repository's docs/gpu.md.

License

Apache 2.0, like Stanza, whose code this ports (see NOTICE). Stanza's models are not included. Their licenses vary with the training data.

Source, issues and docs: https://github.com/bisforboman/StanzaSharp