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

With the knowledge gained in this chapter, we are not only able to use many of the pretrained sequence taggers available in Flair, but we are also capable of interpreting and understanding their output.

In this chapter, we covered sequence tagging in Flair from different angles. We touched on the design and architecture of Flair's proposed sequence taggers. We then covered NER motivation and theory, and what pretrained NER taggers can be found in Flair. We did the same with PoS tagging, where we covered the most notable tag sets, such as the Penn tag set and the universal PoS tag set, before covering the important pretrained PoS taggers found in Flair. We then finally studied the two metrics most often used to evaluate sequence taggers, and we emphasized the importance of distinguishing between micro and macro F1 scores.

In the next chapter, we will be looking into using Flair to train, store, and reuse your own sequence labeling models.