Add NER finetuning details by @stefan-it in example readme

examples/README.md

@@ -8,8 +8,9 @@ similar API between the different models.
 | [Language Model fine-tuning](#language-model-fine-tuning) | Fine-tuning the library models for language modeling on a text dataset. Causal language modeling for GPT/GPT-2, masked language modeling for BERT/RoBERTa. |
 | [Language Generation](#language-generation) | Conditional text generation using the auto-regressive models of the library: GPT, GPT-2, Transformer-XL and XLNet.                                         |
 | [GLUE](#glue) | Examples running BERT/XLM/XLNet/RoBERTa on the 9 GLUE tasks. Examples feature distributed training as well as half-precision.                              |
-| [SQuAD](#squad) | Using BERT for question answering, examples with distributed training.                                                                                  |
+| [SQuAD](#squad) | Using BERT/XLM/XLNet/RoBERTa for question answering, examples with distributed training.                                                                                  |
 | [Multiple Choice](#multiple-choice) | Examples running BERT/XLNet/RoBERTa on the SWAG/RACE/ARC tasks. 
+| [Named Entity Recognition](#named-entity-recognition) | Using BERT for Named Entity Recognition (NER) on the CoNLL 2003 dataset, examples with distributed training.                                                                                  |
 
 ## Language model fine-tuning
 
@@ -390,3 +391,103 @@ exact_match = 86.91
 This fine-tuneds model is available as a checkpoint under the reference
 `bert-large-uncased-whole-word-masking-finetuned-squad`.
 
+## Named Entity Recognition
+
+Based on the script [`run_ner.py`](https://github.com/huggingface/transformers/blob/master/examples/run_ner.py).
+This example fine-tune Bert Multilingual on GermEval 2014 (German NER).
+Details and results for the fine-tuning provided by @stefan-it.
+
+### Data (Download and pre-processing steps)
+
+Data can be obtained from the [GermEval 2014](https://sites.google.com/site/germeval2014ner/data) shared task page.
+
+Here are the commands for downloading and pre-processing train, dev and test datasets. The original data format has four (tab-separated) columns, in a pre-processing step only the two relevant columns (token and outer span NER annotation) are extracted:
+
+```bash
+curl -L 'https://sites.google.com/site/germeval2014ner/data/NER-de-train.tsv?attredirects=0&d=1' \
+| grep -v "^#" | cut -f 2,3 | tr '\t' ' ' > train.txt.tmp
+curl -L 'https://sites.google.com/site/germeval2014ner/data/NER-de-dev.tsv?attredirects=0&d=1' \
+| grep -v "^#" | cut -f 2,3 | tr '\t' ' ' > dev.txt.tmp
+curl -L 'https://sites.google.com/site/germeval2014ner/data/NER-de-test.tsv?attredirects=0&d=1' \
+| grep -v "^#" | cut -f 2,3 | tr '\t' ' ' > test.txt.tmp
+```
+
+The GermEval 2014 dataset contains some strange "control character" tokens like `'\x96', '\u200e', '\x95', '\xad' or '\x80'`. One problem with these tokens is, that `BertTokenizer` returns an empty token for them, resulting in misaligned `InputExample`s. I wrote a script that a) filters these tokens and b) splits longer sentences into smaller ones (once the max. subtoken length is reached).
+
+```bash
+wget "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/stefan-it/fine-tuned-berts-seq/master/scripts/preprocess.py"
+```
+Let's define some variables that we need for further pre-processing steps and training the model:
+
+```bash
+export MAX_LENGTH=128
+export BERT_MODEL=bert-base-multilingual-cased
+```
+
+Run the pre-processing script on training, dev and test datasets:
+
+```bash
+python3 preprocess.py train.txt.tmp $BERT_MODEL $MAX_LENGTH > train.txt
+python3 preprocess.py dev.txt.tmp $BERT_MODEL $MAX_LENGTH > dev.txt
+python3 preprocess.py test.txt.tmp $BERT_MODEL $MAX_LENGTH > test.txt
+```
+
+The GermEval 2014 dataset has much more labels than CoNLL-2002/2003 datasets, so an own set of labels must be used:
+
+```bash
+cat train.txt dev.txt test.txt | cut -d " " -f 2 | grep -v "^$"| sort | uniq > labels.txt
+```
+
+### Training
+
+Additional environment variables must be set:
+
+```bash
+export OUTPUT_DIR=germeval-model
+export BATCH_SIZE=32
+export NUM_EPOCHS=3
+export SAVE_STEPS=750
+export SEED=1
+```
+
+To start training, just run:
+
+```bash
+python3 run_ner.py --data_dir ./ \
+--model_type bert \
+--labels ./labels.txt \
+--model_name_or_path $BERT_MODEL \
+--output_dir $OUTPUT_DIR \
+--max_seq_length  $MAX_LENGTH \
+--num_train_epochs $NUM_EPOCHS \
+--per_gpu_train_batch_size $BATCH_SIZE \
+--save_steps $SAVE_STEPS \
+--seed $SEED \
+--do_train \
+--do_eval \
+--do_predict
+```
+
+If your GPU supports half-precision training, just add the `--fp16` flag. After training, the model will be both evaluated on development and test datasets.
+
+### Evaluation
+
+Evaluation on development dataset outputs the following for our example:
+
+```bash
+10/04/2019 00:42:06 - INFO - __main__ -   ***** Eval results  *****
+10/04/2019 00:42:06 - INFO - __main__ -     f1 = 0.8623348017621146
+10/04/2019 00:42:06 - INFO - __main__ -     loss = 0.07183869666975543
+10/04/2019 00:42:06 - INFO - __main__ -     precision = 0.8467916366258111
+10/04/2019 00:42:06 - INFO - __main__ -     recall = 0.8784592370979806
+```
+
+On the test dataset the following results could be achieved:
+
+```bash
+10/04/2019 00:42:42 - INFO - __main__ -   ***** Eval results  *****
+10/04/2019 00:42:42 - INFO - __main__ -     f1 = 0.8614389652384803
+10/04/2019 00:42:42 - INFO - __main__ -     loss = 0.07064602487454782
+10/04/2019 00:42:42 - INFO - __main__ -     precision = 0.8604651162790697
+10/04/2019 00:42:42 - INFO - __main__ -     recall = 0.8624150210424085
+```