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

Training Flair embeddings on the world's smallest language

The Flair package provides a simple, straightforward API for training Flair embeddings. The process involves all the necessary steps required to train any language model. The steps include the following:

  • Preparing the dictionary
  • Preparing the corpus
  • Defining the language model
  • Training the language model

Let's cover the process of training Flair embeddings through a practical hands-on exercise.

Training embedding for most languages is not a quick process. A decent GPU-equipped machine would require over a week of training time to produce results comparable to the state-of-the-art published Flair results in English or similar languages. Most pre-trained Flair embeddings, such as the en English embeddings model, produce embeddings of length 2,048.

Part of the reason why we need 2,048 dimensional vectors is that languages such as English have a huge number of words in the dictionary,...