Tensorflow text summarization setup : What is a workspace file?

Question

Reading the Tensorflow text summarization documentation setup : https://github.com/tensorflow/models/tree/master/textsum it states clone the code to your workspace and create empty WORKSPACE file.

I've created a new folder and cloned https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow.git to this folder , is that what is meant by 'clone the code to your workspace' ? What is an empty workspace file ? Is it an empty file named 'WORKSPACE' ?

Answer 1

WORKSPACE is a file that bazel (tensorflow's build system) searches in the directory hierarchy to determine the root of the project.

You can create a simple empty WORKSPACE file.

$touch WORKSPACE

in my setup I just created another directory

cd models
mkdir traintextsum
cd traintextsum
ln -sf ../textsum/ .
mkdir data 
touch WORKSPACE
bazel build -c opt --config=cuda textsum/...

keep in mind that the model is not trained. So to produce any meaningful result you would have to have some dataset that has the Gigaword Dataset Format to train it on.

The dataset has a license and thus is not freely available online (costs around $6K or $27K for a year subscription).

I am not aware of any other meaningful dataset that has that format besides the Gigaword itself.