sentencepiece: pip install failed on linux cluster

System Info: Linux version 4.14.0-115.7.1.el7a.ppc64le (mockbuild@ppc-056.build.eng.bos.redhat.com) (gcc version 4.8.5 20150623 (Red Hat 4.8.5-36) (GCC))

I tried both installing from PyPI and installing from source file, but neither of them worked.

When installing from PyPI:

$ pip install sentencepiece
Collecting sentencepiece
  Using cached https://files.pythonhosted.org/packages/1b/87/c3c2fa8cbec61fffe031ca9f0da512747520bec9be7f886f748457daac31/sentencepiece-0.1.83.tar.gz
    Complete output from command python setup.py egg_info:
    Traceback (most recent call last):
      File "<string>", line 1, in <module>
      File "/tmp/pip-install-t33o0yz4/sentencepiece/setup.py", line 29, in <module>
        with codecs.open(os.path.join('..', 'VERSION'), 'r', 'utf-8') as f:
      File "/opt/anaconda3/lib/python3.6/codecs.py", line 897, in open
        file = builtins.open(filename, mode, buffering)
    FileNotFoundError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: '../VERSION'

    ----------------------------------------
Command "python setup.py egg_info" failed with error code 1 in /tmp/pip-install-t33o0yz4/sentencepiece/

I then manually downloaded the tar.gz source file, uncompressed it, changed the directory to “./python”, and tried to install directly from the setup.py:

$ python setup.py install
Package sentencepiece was not found in the pkg-config search path.
Perhaps you should add the directory containing `sentencepiece.pc'
to the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable
No package 'sentencepiece' found
Failed to find sentencepiece pkgconfig

However pip install . gives a different error message:

$ pip install .
Processing <...>/sentencepiece-0.1.83/python
    Complete output from command python setup.py egg_info:
    Traceback (most recent call last):
      File "<string>", line 1, in <module>
      File "/tmp/pip-req-build-209jgy5x/setup.py", line 29, in <module>
        with codecs.open(os.path.join('..', 'VERSION'), 'r', 'utf-8') as f:
      File "/opt/anaconda3/lib/python3.6/codecs.py", line 897, in open
        file = builtins.open(filename, mode, buffering)
    FileNotFoundError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: '../VERSION'

    ----------------------------------------
Command "python setup.py egg_info" failed with error code 1 in /tmp/pip-req-build-209jgy5x/

Does anyone know what might be wrong and how to fix it? Thank you!