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

Who this book is for

This book is for anyone eager to learn about NLP through one of the most beginner-friendly, yet powerful, Python NLP libraries out there. The audience includes software engineering students, developers, data scientists, and anyone who is transitioning into NLP and is interested in learning about practical approaches to solving problems with Flair. This book, however, is not recommended for readers aiming to get an in-depth theoretical understanding of the mathematics behind NLP. Beginner-level knowledge of Python is recommended to get the most out of this book.

The book is also an opportunity for anyone hoping to start contributing to the open source community. You could fix bugs, create new tutorials, expand documentation, add support for new languages by building pre-trained models, or simply open new GitHub issues with suggestions about improving Flair. The knowledge gained by reading and doing the exercises in this book will help you considerably on your way to becoming an active Flair contributor.