# Token classification [[open-in-colab]] Token classification assigns a label to individual tokens in a sentence. One of the most common token classification tasks is Named Entity Recognition (NER). NER attempts to find a label for each entity in a sentence, such as a person, location, or organization. This guide will show you how to: 1. Finetune [DistilBERT](https://huggingface.co/distilbert-base-uncased) on the [WNUT 17](https://huggingface.co/datasets/wnut_17) dataset to detect new entities. 2. Use your finetuned model for inference. The task illustrated in this tutorial is supported by the following model architectures: [ALBERT](../model_doc/albert), [BERT](../model_doc/bert), [BigBird](../model_doc/big_bird), [BioGpt](../model_doc/biogpt), [BLOOM](../model_doc/bloom), [CamemBERT](../model_doc/camembert), [CANINE](../model_doc/canine), [ConvBERT](../model_doc/convbert), [Data2VecText](../model_doc/data2vec-text), [DeBERTa](../model_doc/deberta), [DeBERTa-v2](../model_doc/deberta-v2), [DistilBERT](../model_doc/distilbert), [ELECTRA](../model_doc/electra), [ERNIE](../model_doc/ernie), [ErnieM](../model_doc/ernie_m), [ESM](../model_doc/esm), [Falcon](../model_doc/falcon), [FlauBERT](../model_doc/flaubert), [FNet](../model_doc/fnet), [Funnel Transformer](../model_doc/funnel), [GPT-Sw3](../model_doc/gpt-sw3), [OpenAI GPT-2](../model_doc/gpt2), [GPTBigCode](../model_doc/gpt_bigcode), [GPT Neo](../model_doc/gpt_neo), [GPT NeoX](../model_doc/gpt_neox), [I-BERT](../model_doc/ibert), [LayoutLM](../model_doc/layoutlm), [LayoutLMv2](../model_doc/layoutlmv2), [LayoutLMv3](../model_doc/layoutlmv3), [LiLT](../model_doc/lilt), [Longformer](../model_doc/longformer), [LUKE](../model_doc/luke), [MarkupLM](../model_doc/markuplm), [MEGA](../model_doc/mega), [Megatron-BERT](../model_doc/megatron-bert), [MobileBERT](../model_doc/mobilebert), [MPNet](../model_doc/mpnet), [MPT](../model_doc/mpt), [MRA](../model_doc/mra), [Nezha](../model_doc/nezha), [Nyströmformer](../model_doc/nystromformer), [QDQBert](../model_doc/qdqbert), [RemBERT](../model_doc/rembert), [RoBERTa](../model_doc/roberta), [RoBERTa-PreLayerNorm](../model_doc/roberta-prelayernorm), [RoCBert](../model_doc/roc_bert), [RoFormer](../model_doc/roformer), [SqueezeBERT](../model_doc/squeezebert), [XLM](../model_doc/xlm), [XLM-RoBERTa](../model_doc/xlm-roberta), [XLM-RoBERTa-XL](../model_doc/xlm-roberta-xl), [XLNet](../model_doc/xlnet), [X-MOD](../model_doc/xmod), [YOSO](../model_doc/yoso) Before you begin, make sure you have all the necessary libraries installed: ```bash pip install transformers datasets evaluate seqeval ``` We encourage you to login to your Hugging Face account so you can upload and share your model with the community. When prompted, enter your token to login: ```py >>> from huggingface_hub import notebook_login >>> notebook_login() ``` ## Load WNUT 17 dataset Start by loading the WNUT 17 dataset from the 🤗 Datasets library: ```py >>> from datasets import load_dataset >>> wnut = load_dataset("wnut_17") ``` Then take a look at an example: ```py >>> wnut["train"][0] {'id': '0', 'ner_tags': [0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 7, 8, 8, 0, 7, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0], 'tokens': ['@paulwalk', 'It', "'s", 'the', 'view', 'from', 'where', 'I', "'m", 'living', 'for', 'two', 'weeks', '.', 'Empire', 'State', 'Building', '=', 'ESB', '.', 'Pretty', 'bad', 'storm', 'here', 'last', 'evening', '.'] } ``` Each number in `ner_tags` represents an entity. Convert the numbers to their label names to find out what the entities are: ```py >>> label_list = wnut["train"].features[f"ner_tags"].feature.names >>> label_list [ "O", "B-corporation", "I-corporation", "B-creative-work", "I-creative-work", "B-group", "I-group", "B-location", "I-location", "B-person", "I-person", "B-product", "I-product", ] ``` The letter that prefixes each `ner_tag` indicates the token position of the entity: - `B-` indicates the beginning of an entity. - `I-` indicates a token is contained inside the same entity (for example, the `State` token is a part of an entity like `Empire State Building`). - `0` indicates the token doesn't correspond to any entity. ## Preprocess The next step is to load a DistilBERT tokenizer to preprocess the `tokens` field: ```py >>> from transformers import AutoTokenizer >>> tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained("distilbert-base-uncased") ``` As you saw in the example `tokens` field above, it looks like the input has already been tokenized. But the input actually hasn't been tokenized yet and you'll need to set `is_split_into_words=True` to tokenize the words into subwords. For example: ```py >>> example = wnut["train"][0] >>> tokenized_input = tokenizer(example["tokens"], is_split_into_words=True) >>> tokens = tokenizer.convert_ids_to_tokens(tokenized_input["input_ids"]) >>> tokens ['[CLS]', '@', 'paul', '##walk', 'it', "'", 's', 'the', 'view', 'from', 'where', 'i', "'", 'm', 'living', 'for', 'two', 'weeks', '.', 'empire', 'state', 'building', '=', 'es', '##b', '.', 'pretty', 'bad', 'storm', 'here', 'last', 'evening', '.', '[SEP]'] ``` However, this adds some special tokens `[CLS]` and `[SEP]` and the subword tokenization creates a mismatch between the input and labels. A single word corresponding to a single label may now be split into two subwords. You'll need to realign the tokens and labels by: 1. Mapping all tokens to their corresponding word with the [`word_ids`](https://huggingface.co/docs/transformers/main_classes/tokenizer#transformers.BatchEncoding.word_ids) method. 2. Assigning the label `-100` to the special tokens `[CLS]` and `[SEP]` so they're ignored by the PyTorch loss function (see [CrossEntropyLoss](https://pytorch.org/docs/stable/generated/torch.nn.CrossEntropyLoss.html)). 3. Only labeling the first token of a given word. Assign `-100` to other subtokens from the same word. Here is how you can create a function to realign the tokens and labels, and truncate sequences to be no longer than DistilBERT's maximum input length: ```py >>> def tokenize_and_align_labels(examples): ... tokenized_inputs = tokenizer(examples["tokens"], truncation=True, is_split_into_words=True) ... labels = [] ... for i, label in enumerate(examples[f"ner_tags"]): ... word_ids = tokenized_inputs.word_ids(batch_index=i) # Map tokens to their respective word. ... previous_word_idx = None ... label_ids = [] ... for word_idx in word_ids: # Set the special tokens to -100. ... if word_idx is None: ... label_ids.append(-100) ... elif word_idx != previous_word_idx: # Only label the first token of a given word. ... label_ids.append(label[word_idx]) ... else: ... label_ids.append(-100) ... previous_word_idx = word_idx ... labels.append(label_ids) ... tokenized_inputs["labels"] = labels ... return tokenized_inputs ``` To apply the preprocessing function over the entire dataset, use 🤗 Datasets [`~datasets.Dataset.map`] function. You can speed up the `map` function by setting `batched=True` to process multiple elements of the dataset at once: ```py >>> tokenized_wnut = wnut.map(tokenize_and_align_labels, batched=True) ``` Now create a batch of examples using [`DataCollatorWithPadding`]. It's more efficient to *dynamically pad* the sentences to the longest length in a batch during collation, instead of padding the whole dataset to the maximum length. ```py >>> from transformers import DataCollatorForTokenClassification >>> data_collator = DataCollatorForTokenClassification(tokenizer=tokenizer) ``` ```py >>> from transformers import DataCollatorForTokenClassification >>> data_collator = DataCollatorForTokenClassification(tokenizer=tokenizer, return_tensors="tf") ``` ## Evaluate Including a metric during training is often helpful for evaluating your model's performance. You can quickly load a evaluation method with the 🤗 [Evaluate](https://huggingface.co/docs/evaluate/index) library. For this task, load the [seqeval](https://huggingface.co/spaces/evaluate-metric/seqeval) framework (see the 🤗 Evaluate [quick tour](https://huggingface.co/docs/evaluate/a_quick_tour) to learn more about how to load and compute a metric). Seqeval actually produces several scores: precision, recall, F1, and accuracy. ```py >>> import evaluate >>> seqeval = evaluate.load("seqeval") ``` Get the NER labels first, and then create a function that passes your true predictions and true labels to [`~evaluate.EvaluationModule.compute`] to calculate the scores: ```py >>> import numpy as np >>> labels = [label_list[i] for i in example[f"ner_tags"]] >>> def compute_metrics(p): ... predictions, labels = p ... predictions = np.argmax(predictions, axis=2) ... true_predictions = [ ... [label_list[p] for (p, l) in zip(prediction, label) if l != -100] ... for prediction, label in zip(predictions, labels) ... ] ... true_labels = [ ... [label_list[l] for (p, l) in zip(prediction, label) if l != -100] ... for prediction, label in zip(predictions, labels) ... ] ... results = seqeval.compute(predictions=true_predictions, references=true_labels) ... return { ... "precision": results["overall_precision"], ... "recall": results["overall_recall"], ... "f1": results["overall_f1"], ... "accuracy": results["overall_accuracy"], ... } ``` Your `compute_metrics` function is ready to go now, and you'll return to it when you setup your training. ## Train Before you start training your model, create a map of the expected ids to their labels with `id2label` and `label2id`: ```py >>> id2label = { ... 0: "O", ... 1: "B-corporation", ... 2: "I-corporation", ... 3: "B-creative-work", ... 4: "I-creative-work", ... 5: "B-group", ... 6: "I-group", ... 7: "B-location", ... 8: "I-location", ... 9: "B-person", ... 10: "I-person", ... 11: "B-product", ... 12: "I-product", ... } >>> label2id = { ... "O": 0, ... "B-corporation": 1, ... "I-corporation": 2, ... "B-creative-work": 3, ... "I-creative-work": 4, ... "B-group": 5, ... "I-group": 6, ... "B-location": 7, ... "I-location": 8, ... "B-person": 9, ... "I-person": 10, ... "B-product": 11, ... "I-product": 12, ... } ``` If you aren't familiar with finetuning a model with the [`Trainer`], take a look at the basic tutorial [here](../training#train-with-pytorch-trainer)! You're ready to start training your model now! Load DistilBERT with [`AutoModelForTokenClassification`] along with the number of expected labels, and the label mappings: ```py >>> from transformers import AutoModelForTokenClassification, TrainingArguments, Trainer >>> model = AutoModelForTokenClassification.from_pretrained( ... "distilbert-base-uncased", num_labels=13, id2label=id2label, label2id=label2id ... ) ``` At this point, only three steps remain: 1. Define your training hyperparameters in [`TrainingArguments`]. The only required parameter is `output_dir` which specifies where to save your model. You'll push this model to the Hub by setting `push_to_hub=True` (you need to be signed in to Hugging Face to upload your model). At the end of each epoch, the [`Trainer`] will evaluate the seqeval scores and save the training checkpoint. 2. Pass the training arguments to [`Trainer`] along with the model, dataset, tokenizer, data collator, and `compute_metrics` function. 3. Call [`~Trainer.train`] to finetune your model. ```py >>> training_args = TrainingArguments( ... output_dir="my_awesome_wnut_model", ... learning_rate=2e-5, ... per_device_train_batch_size=16, ... per_device_eval_batch_size=16, ... num_train_epochs=2, ... weight_decay=0.01, ... evaluation_strategy="epoch", ... save_strategy="epoch", ... load_best_model_at_end=True, ... push_to_hub=True, ... ) >>> trainer = Trainer( ... model=model, ... args=training_args, ... train_dataset=tokenized_wnut["train"], ... eval_dataset=tokenized_wnut["test"], ... tokenizer=tokenizer, ... data_collator=data_collator, ... compute_metrics=compute_metrics, ... ) >>> trainer.train() ``` Once training is completed, share your model to the Hub with the [`~transformers.Trainer.push_to_hub`] method so everyone can use your model: ```py >>> trainer.push_to_hub() ``` If you aren't familiar with finetuning a model with Keras, take a look at the basic tutorial [here](../training#train-a-tensorflow-model-with-keras)! To finetune a model in TensorFlow, start by setting up an optimizer function, learning rate schedule, and some training hyperparameters: ```py >>> from transformers import create_optimizer >>> batch_size = 16 >>> num_train_epochs = 3 >>> num_train_steps = (len(tokenized_wnut["train"]) // batch_size) * num_train_epochs >>> optimizer, lr_schedule = create_optimizer( ... init_lr=2e-5, ... num_train_steps=num_train_steps, ... weight_decay_rate=0.01, ... num_warmup_steps=0, ... ) ``` Then you can load DistilBERT with [`TFAutoModelForTokenClassification`] along with the number of expected labels, and the label mappings: ```py >>> from transformers import TFAutoModelForTokenClassification >>> model = TFAutoModelForTokenClassification.from_pretrained( ... "distilbert-base-uncased", num_labels=13, id2label=id2label, label2id=label2id ... ) ``` Convert your datasets to the `tf.data.Dataset` format with [`~transformers.TFPreTrainedModel.prepare_tf_dataset`]: ```py >>> tf_train_set = model.prepare_tf_dataset( ... tokenized_wnut["train"], ... shuffle=True, ... batch_size=16, ... collate_fn=data_collator, ... ) >>> tf_validation_set = model.prepare_tf_dataset( ... tokenized_wnut["validation"], ... shuffle=False, ... batch_size=16, ... collate_fn=data_collator, ... ) ``` Configure the model for training with [`compile`](https://keras.io/api/models/model_training_apis/#compile-method). Note that Transformers models all have a default task-relevant loss function, so you don't need to specify one unless you want to: ```py >>> import tensorflow as tf >>> model.compile(optimizer=optimizer) # No loss argument! ``` The last two things to setup before you start training is to compute the seqeval scores from the predictions, and provide a way to push your model to the Hub. Both are done by using [Keras callbacks](../main_classes/keras_callbacks). Pass your `compute_metrics` function to [`~transformers.KerasMetricCallback`]: ```py >>> from transformers.keras_callbacks import KerasMetricCallback >>> metric_callback = KerasMetricCallback(metric_fn=compute_metrics, eval_dataset=tf_validation_set) ``` Specify where to push your model and tokenizer in the [`~transformers.PushToHubCallback`]: ```py >>> from transformers.keras_callbacks import PushToHubCallback >>> push_to_hub_callback = PushToHubCallback( ... output_dir="my_awesome_wnut_model", ... tokenizer=tokenizer, ... ) ``` Then bundle your callbacks together: ```py >>> callbacks = [metric_callback, push_to_hub_callback] ``` Finally, you're ready to start training your model! Call [`fit`](https://keras.io/api/models/model_training_apis/#fit-method) with your training and validation datasets, the number of epochs, and your callbacks to finetune the model: ```py >>> model.fit(x=tf_train_set, validation_data=tf_validation_set, epochs=3, callbacks=callbacks) ``` Once training is completed, your model is automatically uploaded to the Hub so everyone can use it! For a more in-depth example of how to finetune a model for token classification, take a look at the corresponding [PyTorch notebook](https://colab.research.google.com/github/huggingface/notebooks/blob/main/examples/token_classification.ipynb) or [TensorFlow notebook](https://colab.research.google.com/github/huggingface/notebooks/blob/main/examples/token_classification-tf.ipynb). ## Inference Great, now that you've finetuned a model, you can use it for inference! Grab some text you'd like to run inference on: ```py >>> text = "The Golden State Warriors are an American professional basketball team based in San Francisco." ``` The simplest way to try out your finetuned model for inference is to use it in a [`pipeline`]. Instantiate a `pipeline` for NER with your model, and pass your text to it: ```py >>> from transformers import pipeline >>> classifier = pipeline("ner", model="stevhliu/my_awesome_wnut_model") >>> classifier(text) [{'entity': 'B-location', 'score': 0.42658573, 'index': 2, 'word': 'golden', 'start': 4, 'end': 10}, {'entity': 'I-location', 'score': 0.35856336, 'index': 3, 'word': 'state', 'start': 11, 'end': 16}, {'entity': 'B-group', 'score': 0.3064001, 'index': 4, 'word': 'warriors', 'start': 17, 'end': 25}, {'entity': 'B-location', 'score': 0.65523505, 'index': 13, 'word': 'san', 'start': 80, 'end': 83}, {'entity': 'B-location', 'score': 0.4668663, 'index': 14, 'word': 'francisco', 'start': 84, 'end': 93}] ``` You can also manually replicate the results of the `pipeline` if you'd like: Tokenize the text and return PyTorch tensors: ```py >>> from transformers import AutoTokenizer >>> tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained("stevhliu/my_awesome_wnut_model") >>> inputs = tokenizer(text, return_tensors="pt") ``` Pass your inputs to the model and return the `logits`: ```py >>> from transformers import AutoModelForTokenClassification >>> model = AutoModelForTokenClassification.from_pretrained("stevhliu/my_awesome_wnut_model") >>> with torch.no_grad(): ... logits = model(**inputs).logits ``` Get the class with the highest probability, and use the model's `id2label` mapping to convert it to a text label: ```py >>> predictions = torch.argmax(logits, dim=2) >>> predicted_token_class = [model.config.id2label[t.item()] for t in predictions[0]] >>> predicted_token_class ['O', 'O', 'B-location', 'I-location', 'B-group', 'O', 'O', 'O', 'O', 'O', 'O', 'O', 'O', 'B-location', 'B-location', 'O', 'O'] ``` Tokenize the text and return TensorFlow tensors: ```py >>> from transformers import AutoTokenizer >>> tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained("stevhliu/my_awesome_wnut_model") >>> inputs = tokenizer(text, return_tensors="tf") ``` Pass your inputs to the model and return the `logits`: ```py >>> from transformers import TFAutoModelForTokenClassification >>> model = TFAutoModelForTokenClassification.from_pretrained("stevhliu/my_awesome_wnut_model") >>> logits = model(**inputs).logits ``` Get the class with the highest probability, and use the model's `id2label` mapping to convert it to a text label: ```py >>> predicted_token_class_ids = tf.math.argmax(logits, axis=-1) >>> predicted_token_class = [model.config.id2label[t] for t in predicted_token_class_ids[0].numpy().tolist()] >>> predicted_token_class ['O', 'O', 'B-location', 'I-location', 'B-group', 'O', 'O', 'O', 'O', 'O', 'O', 'O', 'O', 'B-location', 'B-location', 'O', 'O'] ```