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

This simple and fun hands-on exercise concludes our journey through the state-of-the-art NLP library Flair. At the beginning of the book, we kicked off with some motivation, followed by the Flair base types that set the foundation of how different objects typically interact with one another in Flair. We then covered word and document embeddings, which are an essential part of Flair and one of the main reasons why its taggers achieve state-of-the-art performance on sequence labeling tasks. This allowed us to progress towards sequence tagging itself, where we learned about all the different types of sequence taggers available in Flair. However, we weren't constrained to reusing the pre-trained models only; we quickly learned how to train our own sequence taggers as part of the next chapter. This left us overwhelmed by the long list of training hyperparameters, and we had to find a way of using machine learning to help us find the best set of parameters. We did so by mastering...