Is there a way to download only NQ dev?
Ok, got it. I think this could be a valuable feature - especially for large datasets like NQ, but potentially also others. 
For us, it will in this case make the difference of using the library or keeping the old downloads of the raw dev datasets.  
However, I don't know if that fits into your plans with the library and can also understand if you don't want to support this.
Maybe I missed that in the docs, but is there a way to only download the dev set of natural questions (~1 GB)? 
As we want to benchmark QA models on different datasets, I would like to avoid downloading the 41GB of training data. 

I tried
```
dataset = nlp.load_dataset('natural_questions', split="validation", beam_runner="DirectRunner")
```
But this still triggered a big download of presumably the whole dataset. Is there any way of doing this or are splits / slicing options only available after downloading?

Thanks!
Is there a way to download only NQ dev? 
 Maybe I missed that in the docs, but is there a way to only download the dev set of natural questions (~1 GB)? 
As we want to benchmark QA models on different datasets, I would like to avoid downloading the 41GB of training data. 

I tried
```
dataset = nlp.load_dataset('natural_questions', split="validation", beam_runner="DirectRunner")
```
But this still triggered a big download of presumably the whole dataset. Is there any way of doing this or are splits / slicing options only available after downloading?

Thanks! 
 Ok, got it. I think this could be a valuable feature - especially for large datasets like NQ, but potentially also others. 
For us, it will in this case make the difference of using the library or keeping the old downloads of the raw dev datasets.  
However, I don't know if that fits into your plans with the library and can also understand if you don't want to support this.