Using previous model-last as base model in prodigy train

[ryanwesslen]

hi @joebuckle!

@joebuckle

When I opted to use this previously trained model-last as the --base-model for our latest iteration, we got to .90+. Is this a good idea? Or is this overfitting?

Great question! In general, we recommend against this:

Commands for training NER-Model in prodigy

In that case, you can just use the --base-model argument, e.g. --base-model /path/to/your/model. In general, we'd recommend retraining a model on all annotations from scratch, rather than updating a previously trained artifact, since this will give you better and more reliable results. But the base model setting can still be useful if you want to update one of the trained pipelines provided by spaCy etc.

Yes - it's typically better to train a model from scratch, using the same full corpus (instead of updating the same artifact over and over again, which often makes it much harder to avoid overfitting and forgetting effects).

The one thing you may want to do (if you're not already) is to modify your base-model with different vectors (e.g., en_core_web_md or en_core_web_lg). There's a bit about it in the docs:

Using pretrained word embeddings to initialize your model is easy and can make a big difference. If you’re using spaCy, try using the en_core_web_lg model as the base model. If you’re working with domain-specific texts, you can train your own vectors and create a base model with them.