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

Chapter 2: Flair Base Types

A good place to start with any NLP framework is getting comfortable with its basic objects and methods used frequently throughout the code. In Flair, the first step is getting familiar with its base types. These are the basic objects that are used for defining sentences or text fragments and forming tokens through tokenization.

One of the main challenges NLP is struggling with today is its support for underrepresented languages. Most state-of-the-art prebuilt NLP models are usually built only for some of the most spoken languages, while failing to provide support for the roughly 7,000 other languages spoken on the planet today. While Flair stands out with its excellent language coverage and its work on multilingual embeddings, it's still far from supporting all the possible languages in areas such as corpora availability, tokenization methods, and prebuilt sequence tagging models. To form tokens for a language with special tokenization rules currently...