Kashif Rasul


2019

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FLAIR: An Easy-to-Use Framework for State-of-the-Art NLP
Alan Akbik | Tanja Bergmann | Duncan Blythe | Kashif Rasul | Stefan Schweter | Roland Vollgraf
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Demonstrations)

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 .