Loading NLP HuggingFace models into AllenNLP framework

How to take advantage of the transformers library in HuggingFace and extend its functionality using AllenNLP

If we would have to name two libraries in the NLP world that contain cutting-edge models architecture implementations we will probably name transformers by HuggingFace and AllenNLP from AllenAI.

I recently come across a scenario where I wanted to load a model constructed in transformers to the AllenNLP library to use its interpretability capabilities (Model interpretability — Making your model confesses: Saliency maps). In this post, I will go ever the steps to make it happen!

Introduction

Everyone loves HuggingFace and their transformers library. They have been on a mission to advance and democratize artificial intelligence through open source and open science. With ~50,000 pre-trained machine-learning (last time I checked) models and 5,000 datasets currently hosted on the platform, HuggingFace enables the community to build their own Machine Learning capabilities, share their own models, and more.

AllenNLP is a general deep learning framework for NLP, established by the world-famous Allen Institute for AI Lab. Its team envisions language-centered AI that…