Error in Installation

I am trying to install sentence transformers library with Python 3.7 in a virtual environment. I have installed pytorch 1.4 in same conda environment.

I am using REDHAT.

But I am facing below error while installation. I have tried with direct pip installation and by checking out code and used pip -e option. Kindly help.

Using cached sentencepiece-0.1.83.tar.gz (497 kB)
  ERROR: Command errored out with exit status 1:
   command: /power8nfs/home/ai_u/.conda/envs/tanveer/bin/python -c 'import sys, setuptools, tokenize; sys.argv[0] = '"'"'/tmp/pip-install-6kz16kgn/sentencepiece/setup.py'"'"'; __file__='"'"'/tmp/pip-install-6kz16kgn/sentencepiece/setup.py'"'"';f=getattr(tokenize, '"'"'open'"'"', open)(__file__);code=f.read().replace('"'"'\r\n'"'"', '"'"'\n'"'"');f.close();exec(compile(code, __file__, '"'"'exec'"'"'))' egg_info --egg-base /tmp/pip-install-6kz16kgn/sentencepiece/pip-egg-info
       cwd: /tmp/pip-install-6kz16kgn/sentencepiece/
  Complete output (7 lines):
  Traceback (most recent call last):
    File "<string>", line 1, in <module>
    File "/tmp/pip-install-6kz16kgn/sentencepiece/setup.py", line 29, in <module>
      with codecs.open(os.path.join('..', 'VERSION'), 'r', 'utf-8') as f:
    File "/power8nfs/home/ai_u/.conda/envs/tanveer/lib/python3.7/codecs.py", line 904, in open
      file = builtins.open(filename, mode, buffering)
  FileNotFoundError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: '../VERSION'
  ----------------------------------------
ERROR: Command errored out with exit status 1: python setup.py egg_info Check the logs for full command output.

[nreimers]

The issue is with the installation of sentence piece. Sadly not sure what the issue is there.

You could try to install sentence transformers without dependencies:

pip install --no-deps sentence-transformers 

And than install individually the different dependencies:

https://github.com/UKPLab/sentence-transformers/blob/master/requirements.txt

transformers requires sentence piece for the XLM-R model. Maybe you need to install it also without dependencies.

Without sentence piece, all models except the XLM-RoBERTa model will work. So you can still use BERT or RoBERTa models for your task.

Best Nils Reimers

[nreimers]

Great that it worked and thanks for posting the solution.