keeping up with the evolving python ecosystem

New:

• Added a logo to textacy's documentation and social preview 📃
• Added type hints throughout the code base, for more expressive type indicators in docstrings and for static type checkers used by developers to code more effectively (PR #289)
• Added a preprocessing function to normalize sequences of repeating characters (Issue #275)

Changed:

• Improved core Corpus functionality using recent additions to spacy (PR #285)
  • Re-implemented Corpus.save() and Corpus.load() using spacy's new DocBin class, which resolved a few bugs/issues (Issue #254)
  • Added n_process arg to Corpus.add() to set the number of parallel processes used when adding many items to a corpus, following spacy's updates to nlp.pipe() (Issue #277)
  • Bumped minimum spaCy version from 2.0.12 => 2.2.0, accordingly
• Added handling for zero-width whitespaces into normalize_whitespace() function (Issue #278)
• Improved a couple rough spots in package administration:
  • Moved package setup information into a declarative configuration file, in an attempt to keep up with evolving best practices for Python packaging
  • Simplified the configuration and interoperability of sphinx + github pages for generating package documentation

Fixed:

• Fixed typo in ConceptNet docstring (Issue #280)
• Trained and distributed a LangIdentifier model using scikit-learn==0.22, to prevent ambiguous errors when trying to load a file that didn't exist (Issues #291, #292)