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

Summary

Throughout this book, we have covered several concepts, features, and ways of using Flair to solve NLP problems. We started with the base types and used the pre-trained Flair models. We explained the idea of sequence tagging and embeddings, including their role in the downstream NLP tasks. We learned how to train our own sequence tagging models and even train our own embeddings. We now know how to train models using the optimal training parameters by utilizing the Flair hyperparameter optimization tools. We also learned about text classifiers, including the few-shot and zero-shot Task-Aware Sentences (TARS) classifier, which delivers excellent performance, utilizing only a few training examples.

Finally, in this chapter, we learned about ways of deploying Flair models to production. We now not only know how to use Flair to build NLP models, but also how to make them widely available by deploying them to production.

In the upcoming chapter, we plan to combine all the...