FLAIR: An Easy-to-Use Framework for State-of-the-Art NLP

Alan Akbik, Tanja Bergmann, Duncan Blythe, Kashif Rasul, Stefan Schweter, Roland Vollgraf


Abstract
We present FLAIR, an NLP framework designed to facilitate training and distribution of state-of-the-art sequence labeling, text classification and language models. The core idea of the framework is to present a simple, unified interface for conceptually very different types of word and document embeddings. This effectively hides all embedding-specific engineering complexity and allows researchers to “mix and match” various embeddings with little effort. The framework also implements standard model training and hyperparameter selection routines, as well as a data fetching module that can download publicly available NLP datasets and convert them into data structures for quick set up of experiments. Finally, FLAIR also ships with a “model zoo” of pre-trained models to allow researchers to use state-of-the-art NLP models in their applications. This paper gives an overview of the framework and its functionality. The framework is available on GitHub at https://github.com/zalandoresearch/flair .
Anthology ID:
N19-4010
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Demonstrations)
Month:
June
Year:
2019
Address:
Minneapolis, Minnesota
Editors:
Waleed Ammar, Annie Louis, Nasrin Mostafazadeh
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
54–59
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/N19-4010
DOI:
10.18653/v1/N19-4010
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Alan Akbik, Tanja Bergmann, Duncan Blythe, Kashif Rasul, Stefan Schweter, and Roland Vollgraf. 2019. FLAIR: An Easy-to-Use Framework for State-of-the-Art NLP. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Demonstrations), pages 54–59, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
FLAIR: An Easy-to-Use Framework for State-of-the-Art NLP (Akbik et al., NAACL 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-2/N19-4010.pdf
Code
 zalandoresearch/flair
Data
CoNLL 2003IMDb Movie Reviews