Fine-tuning language models for NER

In this section, we will learn how to fine-tune BERT for an NER task. We will first start with the datasets library and by loading the CoNLL-2003 dataset.

The dataset card is accessible at https://huggingface.co/datasets/conll2003. The following screenshot shows this model card from the Hugging Face website:

Figure 6.5 – CoNLL-2003 dataset card from Hugging Face

From this screenshot, it can be seen that the model is trained on this dataset and is currently available and listed in the right panel. However, there are also descriptions of the dataset, such as its size and its characteristics, let’s dive into those now:

1. To load the dataset, the following commands are used:

   import datasets
   conll2003 = datasets.load_dataset("conll2003")

   A download progress bar will appear, and after finishing downloading and caching, the dataset will be ready to use. The following screenshot shows the progress...