Fine-tuning language models for NER

In this section, we will learn how to fine-tune BERT for an NER task. We first start with the datasets library and by loading the conll2003 dataset.

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

Figure 6.4 – CONLL2003 dataset card from HuggingFace

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:

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 the downloading and caching, the dataset will be ready to use. The following screenshot shows the progress bars:

   Figure 6.5 – Downloading and preparing...