Flair embeddings
Flair embeddings are a special type of contextual string embeddings that model words as a sequence of characters. They are the reason behind Flair's excellent sequence tagging performance and were essentially the motivation for the introduction of the Flair NLP framework. The Contextual String Embeddings for Sequence Labeling paper, an interesting and easy read written by the original creator of Flair, explains the inner workings of Flair embeddings brilliantly. But to grasp Flair embeddings from the perspective of an NLP engineer, we only need to understand their two properties: their contextuality and character-level sequence modeling.
Understanding the contextuality of Flair embeddings
The idea behind contextual string embeddings is that each word embedding should be defined by not only its syntactic-semantic meaning but also the context it appears in. What this means is that each word will have a different embedding for every context it appears in.
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