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

Working with parameters for training and evaluation

Flair is arguably one of the simplest NLP frameworks out there. But to produce good performing taggers, we still need to have some level of understanding of the underlying concepts and parameters passed to Flair.

First, let's quickly explain what model training really is.

Understanding neural model training

Neural networks are a special subset of machine learning. They are loosely based on biological neural networks such as the human brain. Neural nets generally comprise the network architecture and their weights and biases.

The network architecture is all that defines the design of the network. It includes everything from the number of layers and the number of input and output nodes to the types of units used. These properties are referred to as hyperparameters. They remain unchanged for a single model training session.

Then, there are weights and biases – they are the final result of model training. The...