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

Hyperparameter optimization in Flair

As we learned in Chapter 5, Training Sequence Labeling Models, the success of model training often depends on a potentially large number of correctly set hyperparameters. This creates the need for finding a set of hyperparameter values that yield optimal performance. We can do this using hyperparameter optimization. Luckily, Flair offers hyperparameter tuning out of the box. Let's learn how to do it.

Hyperparameter optimization in Flair is essentially a wrapper around Hyperopt, which we briefly covered in the previous section. The extra advantage of this wrapper is that it already feeds some sequence tagging specific information into Hyperopt so that we don't have to. In the bare-bones Hyperopt coding exercise, we had to provide all three objects: search space, optimization method, and an objective function. But in Flair, we only need to define the search space and the framework will do the rest.

Hyperparameter tuning in Flair hands...