# 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), [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), [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), [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/tokenizers/python/latest/api/reference.html#tokenizers.Encoding.word_ids) method.
2. Assigning the label `-100` to the special tokens `[CLS]` and `[SEP]` so they're ignored by the PyTorch loss function.
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):
```py
>>> import tensorflow as tf
>>> model.compile(optimizer=optimizer)
```
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']
```