Install LIT

LIT can be installed via pip, or can be built from source.

Install via pip

pip install lit-nlp

The pip installation will install all necessary prerequisite packages for use of the core LIT package. It also installs the code to run our demo examples. It does not install the prerequisites for those demos, so you need to install those yourself if you wish to run the demos. To install those, we recommend using conda with our included environment.yml.

# Set up Python environment
cd ~/lit
conda env create -f environment.yml
conda activate lit-nlp
conda install cudnn cupti  # optional, for GPU support
conda install -c pytorch pytorch  # optional, for PyTorch

If you want to update any of the frontend or core code, you can install a local copy from source:

Install from source

Download the code from our GitHub repo and set up a Python environment:

git clone https://github.com/PAIR-code/lit.git ~/lit

# Set up Python environment
cd ~/lit
conda env create -f environment.yml
conda activate lit-nlp
conda install cudnn cupti  # optional, for GPU support
conda install -c pytorch pytorch  # optional, for PyTorch

# Build the frontend
pushd lit_nlp; yarn && yarn build; popd

Run the included demos

LIT ships with a number of demos that can easily be run after installation.

Quick-start: Classification and regression

To explore classification and regression models tasks from the popular GLUE benchmark:

python -m lit_nlp.examples.glue_demo --port=5432 --quickstart

Navigate to http://localhost:5432 to access the LIT UI.

Your default view will be a small BERT-based model fine-tuned on the Stanford Sentiment Treebank, but you can switch to STS-B or MultiNLI using the toolbar or the gear icon in the upper right.

Language modeling

python -m lit_nlp.examples.pretrained_lm_demo \
  --models=bert-base-uncased --port=5432

In this demo, you can explore predictions from a pretrained language model (i.e. fill in the blanks). Navigate to http://localhost:5432 for the UI.

More examples

The examples directory contains additional examples to explore, all of which can be run similarly to those above.

Use LIT on your own models and data

This is a brief overview of how to run LIT with your own models and datasets. For more details, see the documentation in the code repository.

To run LIT with your own models and data, you can create a custom demo.py script that passes these to the LIT server. For example:

def main(_):
  # MulitiNLIData implements the Dataset API
  datasets = {
      'mnli_matched': MultiNLIData('/path/to/dev_matched.tsv'),
      'mnli_mismatched': MultiNLIData('/path/to/dev_mismatched.tsv'),
  }

  # NLIModel implements the Model API
  models = {
      'model_foo': NLIModel('/path/to/model/foo/files'),
      'model_bar': NLIModel('/path/to/model/bar/files'),
  }

  lit_demo = lit_nlp.dev_server.Server(models, datasets, port=4321)
  return lit_demo.serve()

if __name__ == '__main__':
  main()

Conceptually, a dataset is just a list of examples and a model is just a function that takes examples and returns predictions. The Dataset and Model classes implement this, and provide metadata to describe themselves to other components.

For full examples, see examples. In particular:

simple_tf2_demo.py for a self-contained Keras/TF2 model for sentiment analysis.
simple_pytorch_demo.py for a self-contained PyTorch model for sentiment analysis.

You can also specify custom frontend modules and layouts by writing a TypeScript entrypoint; see the full docs on custom clients for more.

Datasets

Datasets (Dataset) are just a list of examples, with associated type information following LIT's type system.

spec() should return a flat dict that describes the fields in each example
self._examples should be a list of flat dicts

Implementations should subclass Dataset. Usually this is just a few lines of code - for example, the following is a complete dataset loader for MultiNLI:

class MultiNLIData(Dataset):
  """Loader for MultiNLI development set."""

  NLI_LABELS = ['entailment', 'neutral', 'contradiction']

  def __init__(self, path):
    # Read the eval set from a .tsv file as distributed with the GLUE benchmark.
    df = pandas.read_csv(path, sep='\t')
    # Store as a list of dicts, conforming to self.spec()
    self._examples = [{
      'premise': row['sentence1'],
      'hypothesis': row['sentence2'],
      'label': row['gold_label'],
      'genre': row['genre'],
    } for _, row in df.iterrows()]

  def spec(self):
    return {
      'premise': lit_types.TextSegment(),
      'hypothesis': lit_types.TextSegment(),
      'label': lit_types.Label(vocab=self.NLI_LABELS),
      # We can include additional fields, which don't have to be used by the model.
      'genre': lit_types.Label(),
    }

This implementation uses Pandas to read a TSV file, but you can also use services like TensorFlow Datasets - simply wrap them in your __init__() function.

Note that you can freely add additional features - such as genre in the example above - which the model may not be aware of. The LIT UI will recognize these features for slicing, binning, etc., and they will also be available to interpretation components such as custom metrics.

Models

Models (Model) are functions which take inputs and produce outputs, with associated type information following LIT's type system. The core API consists of three methods:

input_spec() should return a flat dict that describes necessary input fields
output_spec() should return a flat dict that describes the model's predictions and any additional outputs
predict_minibatch() and/or predict() should take a sequence of inputs (satisfying input_spec()) and yields a parallel sequence of outputs matching output_spec().

Implementations should subclass Model. An example for MultiNLI might look something like:

class NLIModel(Model):
  """Wrapper for a Natural Language Inference model."""

  NLI_LABELS = ['entailment', 'neutral', 'contradiction']

  def __init__(self, model_path, **kw):
    # Load the model into memory so we're ready for interactive use.
    self._model = _load_my_model(model_path, **kw)

  ##
  # LIT API implementations
  def predict(self, inputs: List[Input]) -> Iterable[Preds]:
    """Predict on a single minibatch of examples."""
    examples = [self._model.convert_dict_input(d) for d in inputs]  # any custom preprocessing
    return self._model.predict_examples(examples)  # returns a dict for each input

  def input_spec(self):
    """Describe the inputs to the model."""
    return {
        'premise': lit_types.TextSegment(),
        'hypothesis': lit_types.TextSegment(),
    }

  def output_spec(self):
    """Describe the model outputs."""
    return {
      # The 'parent' keyword tells LIT where to look for gold labels when computing metrics.
      'probas': lit_types.MulticlassPreds(vocab=NLI_LABELS, parent='label'),
    }

Unlike the dataset example, this model implementation is incomplete - you'll need to customize predict() (or predict_minibatch()) accordingly with any pre- or post-processing needed, such as tokenization.

Note: The Model base class implements simple batching, aided by the max_minibatch_size() function. This is purely for convenience, since most deep learning models will want this behavior. But if you don't need it, you can simply override the predict() function directly and handle large inputs accordingly.

Note: there are a few additional methods in the model API - see Model for details.