Is there a way to download only NQ dev?
Unfortunately it's not possible to download only the dev set of NQ.

I think we could add a way to download only the test set by adding a custom configuration to the processing script though. 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. I don't think we could force this behavior generally since the dataset script authors are free to organize the file download as they want (sometimes the mapping between split and files can be very much nontrivial) but we can add an additional configuration for Natural Question indeed as @lhoestq indicate.
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!