If you want to perform natural language processing tasks in your cluster, you must deploy an appropriate trained model. There is tooling support in Eland and Kibana to help you prepare and manage models.

Select a trained modeledit

Per the Overview, there are multiple ways that you can use NLP features within the Elastic Stack. After you determine which type of NLP task you want to perform, you must choose an appropriate trained model.

The simplest method is to use a model that has already been fine-tuned for the type of analysis that you want to perform. For example, there are models and data sets available for specific NLP tasks on Hugging Face. These instructions assume you’re using one of those models and do not describe how to create new models. For the current list of supported model architectures, refer to Third party NLP models.

If you choose to perform language identification by using the lang_ident_model_1 that is provided in the cluster, no further steps are required to import or deploy the model. You can skip to using the model in ingestion pipelines.

Import the trained model and vocabularyedit

After you choose a model, you must import it and its tokenizer vocabulary to your cluster. When you import the model, it must be chunked and imported one chunk at a time for storage in parts due to its size.

Eland encapsulates both the conversion of Hugging Face transformer models to their TorchScript representations and the chunking process in a single Python method; it is therefore the recommended import method.

For more details, refer to https://github.com/elastic/eland#nlp-with-pytorch.

Deploy the model in your clusteredit

After you import the model and vocabulary, you can use Kibana to view and manage their deployment across your cluster under Machine Learning > Model Management. Alternatively, you can use the start trained model deployment API or specify the --start option when you run the eland_import_hub_model script.

When you deploy the model, it is allocated to all available machine learning nodes. The model is loaded into memory in a native process that encapsulates libtorch, which is the underlying machine learning library of PyTorch.

You can optionally specify the number of CPU cores it has access to on each node. If you choose to optimize for latency (that is to say, inference should return as fast as possible), you can increase inference_threads to lower latencies. If you choose to optimize for throughput (that is, maximize the number of parallel inference requests), you can increase model_threads to increase throughput. In general, the total size of threading settings across all models on a node should not exceed the number of physical CPU cores available on the node, minus one (for non-inference operations). In Elastic Cloud environments, the core count is virtualized CPUs (vCPUs) and this total size should typically be no more than half the available vCPUs, minus one.

You can view the allocation status in Kibana or by using the get trained model stats API.

Try it outedit

When the model is deployed on at least one node in the cluster, you can begin to perform inference. Inference is a machine learning feature that enables you to use your trained models to perform NLP tasks (such as text extraction, classification, or embeddings) on incoming data.

The simplest method to test your model against new data is to use the infer trained model deployment API. For example, to try a named entity recognition task, provide some sample text:

POST /_ml/trained_models/elastic__distilbert-base-cased-finetuned-conll03-english/deployment/_infer
{
    "docs":{
        "text_field":"Sasha bought 300 shares of Acme Corp in 2022."
        }
}

In this example, the response contains the annotated text output and the recognized entities:

{
  "predicted_value" : "[Sasha](PER&Sasha) bought 300 shares of [Acme Corp](ORG&Acme+Corp) in 2022.",
  "entities" : [
    {
      "entity" : "Sasha",
      "class_name" : "PER",
      "class_probability" : 0.9953193611298665,
      "start_pos" : 0,
      "end_pos" : 5
    },
    {
      "entity" : "Acme Corp",
      "class_name" : "ORG",
      "class_probability" : 0.9996392201598554,
      "start_pos" : 27,
      "end_pos" : 36
    }
  ]
}

If you are satisfied with the results, you can add these NLP tasks in your ingestion pipelines.