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

Self-serving flair models

Regardless of whether you decide to self-serve or use a fully managed service, having some basic understanding of how NLP model deployment inference works in production is always useful.

Since deploying NLP models in production is more of a software engineering feat than an NLP challenge, general software engineering rules apply – the main one being, don't reinvent the wheel.

While implementing your own NLP model-serving frameworks is entirely possible, doing so will require a significant amount of time. Chances are that even if you put your best efforts into implementing a solution, you won't be able to build a product better than the open source solutions out there built by hundreds of different contributors.

There is a wide range of tools and packages out there for self-serving NLP models, but one specific package stands out due to its support for PyTorch packages (Flair is built on top of PyTorch) and its support for Hugging Face...