flair/ner-english-ontonotes-fast

English NER in Flair (Ontonotes fast model)

This is the fast version of the 18-class NER model for English that ships with Flair.

F1-Score: 89.3 (Ontonotes)

Predicts 18 tags:

tag	meaning
CARDINAL	cardinal value
DATE	date value
EVENT	event name
FAC	building name
GPE	geo-political entity
LANGUAGE	language name
LAW	law name
LOC	location name
MONEY	money name
NORP	affiliation
ORDINAL	ordinal value
ORG	organization name
PERCENT	percent value
PERSON	person name
PRODUCT	product name
QUANTITY	quantity value
TIME	time value
WORK_OF_ART	name of work of art

Based on Flair embeddings and LSTM-CRF.

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Demo: How to use in Flair

Requires: Flair (pip install flair)

from flair.data import Sentence
from flair.models import SequenceTagger

# load tagger
tagger = SequenceTagger.load("flair/ner-english-ontonotes-fast")

# make example sentence
sentence = Sentence("On September 1st George Washington won 1 dollar.")

# predict NER tags
tagger.predict(sentence)

# print sentence
print(sentence)

# print predicted NER spans
print('The following NER tags are found:')
# iterate over entities and print
for entity in sentence.get_spans('ner'):
    print(entity)

This yields the following output:

Span [2,3]: "September 1st"   [− Labels: DATE (0.9655)]
Span [4,5]: "George Washington"   [− Labels: PERSON (0.8243)]
Span [7,8]: "1 dollar"   [− Labels: MONEY (0.8022)]

So, the entities "September 1st" (labeled as a date), "George Washington" (labeled as a person) and "1 dollar" (labeled as a money) are found in the sentence "On September 1st George Washington won 1 dollar".

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Training: Script to train this model

The following Flair script was used to train this model:

from flair.data import Corpus
from flair.datasets import ColumnCorpus
from flair.embeddings import WordEmbeddings, StackedEmbeddings, FlairEmbeddings

# 1. load the corpus (Ontonotes does not ship with Flair, you need to download and reformat into a column format yourself)
corpus: Corpus = ColumnCorpus(
                "resources/tasks/onto-ner",
                column_format={0: "text", 1: "pos", 2: "upos", 3: "ner"},
                tag_to_bioes="ner",
            )

# 2. what tag do we want to predict?
tag_type = 'ner'

# 3. make the tag dictionary from the corpus
tag_dictionary = corpus.make_tag_dictionary(tag_type=tag_type)

# 4. initialize each embedding we use
embedding_types = [

    # GloVe embeddings
    WordEmbeddings('en-crawl'),

    # contextual string embeddings, forward
    FlairEmbeddings('news-forward-fast'),

    # contextual string embeddings, backward
    FlairEmbeddings('news-backward-fast'),
]

# embedding stack consists of Flair and GloVe embeddings
embeddings = StackedEmbeddings(embeddings=embedding_types)

# 5. initialize sequence tagger
from flair.models import SequenceTagger

tagger = SequenceTagger(hidden_size=256,
                        embeddings=embeddings,
                        tag_dictionary=tag_dictionary,
                        tag_type=tag_type)

# 6. initialize trainer
from flair.trainers import ModelTrainer

trainer = ModelTrainer(tagger, corpus)

# 7. run training
trainer.train('resources/taggers/ner-english-ontonotes-fast',
              train_with_dev=True,
              max_epochs=150)

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Cite

Please cite the following paper when using this model.

@inproceedings{akbik2018coling,
  title={Contextual String Embeddings for Sequence Labeling},
  author={Akbik, Alan and Blythe, Duncan and Vollgraf, Roland},
  booktitle = {{COLING} 2018, 27th International Conference on Computational Linguistics},
  pages     = {1638--1649},
  year      = {2018}
}

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Issues?

The Flair issue tracker is available here.