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

Summary

Training custom embeddings is one of the more complicated Flair features. It requires all the knowledge and understanding that helps us choose the right parameters, and prepare data correctly to make use of the huge compute power required to train embeddings on larger languages. It is also one of the key concepts to understand and perform correctly because almost everything else that Flair does depends on embeddings in one way or another.

In this chapter, we covered the motivation behind training custom Flair word embeddings and did an overview of the embeddings design. We covered the syntax required to train these embeddings by training forward word embeddings for the world's smallest language – Toki Pona.

So far, we have presented embeddings as something that can be used as an input to a downstream NLP sequence labeling task. But, embeddings can also be used in other NLP applications, such as text classification. Let's learn about that in the next chapter...