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 3: Embeddings in Flair

Embeddings are a core concept of Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks in Flair. Understanding how different embeddings work, what types are available and knowing what type to use in what scenario is important in becoming a seasoned Flair user.

While the framework offers a large selection of different embedding types, there is one that is absolutely essential and plays a pivotal role in achieving Flair's excellent performance on NLP tasks. This type of embeddings, called Flair embeddings, is referred to by the main author as the secret sauce of Flair. Understanding the ins and outs of Flair embeddings will help you better understand the success behind Flair across so many NLP tasks and allow you to choose the right embeddings when training custom models.

In this chapter, we will learn about the different embedding types, how they work, and how to use the individual embedding techniques in Flair for producing word, sentence, and document embeddings...