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

Knowing when to stop and try again

The question "Is my model good enough?" is a whole subfield of machine learning on its own and can't fully be explained in a single chapter. Nevertheless, there's still some practical advice we all can follow to help us determine whether it's worth restarting training with different parameters, different model types, or even new data.

The two basic techniques for measuring success during and after training are as follows:

  1. Monitoring loss
  2. Assessing and comparing performance metrics

Monitoring loss

The first and most important thing you should look out for during training is whether the model is learning in an expected way. This is done by monitoring training output metrics such as loss. A typical training session follows the following pattern. In the initial stage of training, our weights are randomized, and loss will be huge (remember how bad our model with random weights was?). Then, even after one...