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

Understanding the how and why behind custom Flair embeddings

Word embeddings play an important, if not essential, role in sequence tagging models' performance. The details of what embeddings are, is covered in Chapter 3, Embeddings in Flair. But, for the purposes of this chapter, it's important to understand that embeddings are essentially word representations most often found in the form of real-valued vectors. These vectors can then be used as input on a number of downstream tasks, such as part-of-speech (PoS) tagging and named entity recognition (NER). Let's first quickly cover how Flair generates embeddings and how they are trained.

Why training embeddings rarely ever means training embeddings

The term training embeddings is very often a confusing term that dates back to the older methods, where the result of training embeddings was a set of word embeddings. This term makes less sense with Flair's way of training embeddings, and even less so given that...