Book Image

Natural Language Processing with Flair

By : Tadej Magajna
Book Image

Natural Language Processing with Flair

By: Tadej Magajna

Overview of this book

Flair is an easy-to-understand natural language processing (NLP) framework designed to facilitate training and distribution of state-of-the-art NLP models for named entity recognition, part-of-speech tagging, and text classification. Flair is also a text embedding library for combining different types of embeddings, such as document embeddings, Transformer embeddings, and the proposed Flair embeddings. Natural Language Processing with Flair takes a hands-on approach to explaining and solving real-world NLP problems. You'll begin by installing Flair and learning about the basic NLP concepts and terminology. You will explore Flair's extensive features, such as sequence tagging, text classification, and word embeddings, through practical exercises. As you advance, you will train your own sequence labeling and text classification models and learn how to use hyperparameter tuning in order to choose the right training parameters. You will learn about the idea behind one-shot and few-shot learning through a novel text classification technique TARS. Finally, you will solve several real-world NLP problems through hands-on exercises, as well as learn how to deploy Flair models to production. By the end of this Flair book, you'll have developed a thorough understanding of typical NLP problems and you’ll be able to solve them with Flair.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
1
Part 1: Understanding and Solving NLP with Flair
6
Part 2: Deep Dive into Flair – Training Custom Models
11
Part 3: Real-World Applications with Flair

Text classification in Flair

Flair offers a simple interface for using pre-trained models as well as training custom text classifiers. While Flair's secret sauce – the forward and backward Flair embeddings – aren't the best tool for text classification tasks, Flair can leverage other third-party methods to yield excellent performance in text classification.

Let's first learn how to train and use Flair's pre-trained models.

Using pre-trained Flair text classification models

The set of pre-trained text classification models available in Flair is fairly small, and chances are, the model you're looking for isn't there. Even so, the following syntax will be valuable, as the API for loading and using the Flair pre-trained models is the same as the API for loading and using custom-trained models. We will train those in the next section.

Flair currently offers the following stable pre-trained models:

  • sentiment – a sentiment...