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

Sentence and Token objects

Sentence and Token objects can be regarded as the most common objects in Flair syntax. The former is used for representing sentences or any other text fragments such as paragraphs. They are essentially lists of Token objects and their corresponding label assignments.

If you are wondering what objects, classes, and methods mean, this simply suggests that you're not particularly familiar with object-oriented programming (OOP). Luckily, OOP is super easy to get a grasp of in Python. In OOP, pieces of code that store and/or process data are organized into blueprints called classes. An example of a class could be the Word class, which can store and process a single word. Classes in OOP can include several procedures called methods. An example of a Word class method could be get_length(), which would simply return a word's length. Classes can also contain a special type of method called a constructor, which gets called when the class is instantiated...