I was unable to import spacy on Kaggle and here’s how I solved the problem

I have spent the last couple of days working on the spacy library, which is an open source library used to convert words to vectors in Natural Language Processing, or NLP.

Today I spent several hours tackling a complex problem. For some reason I could not get spacy to be install and import on Kaggle and all of my efforts to search for the correct code to facilitate this failed to come to fruition.

I decided to check the code that I was given out on Google Colab, which is a free online Jupyter Notebook, and this code worked on that site. The problem, therefore, was not the code, but the website.

Finally, after struggling for quite some time, I put into the search engine that spacy would not install on Kaggle. I read several questions and the answers to those questions, before I found out what the problem was.

In Kaggle’s Jupyter Notebook, the settings menu has an internet button. The internet button must be put to the ‘on’ position, or spacy will not install or import.

The screenshot below shows where the user can locate the internet button, turn it on, and avoid several hours of troubleshooting code (when it’s not the code that is the problem).

My most recent post on Kaggle can be found here:- https://medium.com/mlearning-ai/conduct-a-twitter-sentiment-analysis-test-using-spacy-7715db4b2c97