Different set of tasks. SpaCy is focused on bread-and-butter tasks like tokenization, part of speech tagging, and dependency parsing (not to say that these are

Different set of tasks. SpaCy is focused on bread-and-butter tasks like tokenization, part of speech tagging, and dependency parsing (not to say that these are easy, but that they are things people have been working on a long time). AllenNLP seems focused on distributing relatively recent neural models (last few years) of more complex language understanding like labeling semantic roles (agents, patients, etc.) and identifying textual entailments (=mining facts from a sentence). It is not great at these tasks, because this is v. difficult and a very active area of ongoing research.