Book Image

Transformers for Natural Language Processing

By : Denis Rothman
Book Image

Transformers for Natural Language Processing

By: Denis Rothman

Overview of this book

The transformer architecture has proved to be revolutionary in outperforming the classical RNN and CNN models in use today. With an apply-as-you-learn approach, Transformers for Natural Language Processing investigates in vast detail the deep learning for machine translations, speech-to-text, text-to-speech, language modeling, question answering, and many more NLP domains with transformers. The book takes you through NLP with Python and examines various eminent models and datasets within the transformer architecture created by pioneers such as Google, Facebook, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Hugging Face. The book trains you in three stages. The first stage introduces you to transformer architectures, starting with the original transformer, before moving on to RoBERTa, BERT, and DistilBERT models. You will discover training methods for smaller transformers that can outperform GPT-3 in some cases. In the second stage, you will apply transformers for Natural Language Understanding (NLU) and Natural Language Generation (NLG). Finally, the third stage will help you grasp advanced language understanding techniques such as optimizing social network datasets and fake news identification. By the end of this NLP book, you will understand transformers from a cognitive science perspective and be proficient in applying pretrained transformer models by tech giants to various datasets.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
13
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14
Index

The background of the Transformer

In this section, we will go through the background of NLP that led to the Transformer. The Transformer model invented by Google Research has toppled decades of Natural Language Processing research, development, and implementations.

Let us first see how that happened when NLP reached a critical limit that required a new approach.

Over the past 100+ years, many great minds have worked on sequence transduction and language modeling. Machines progressively learned how to predict probable sequences of words. It would take a whole book to cite all the giants that made this happen.

In this section, I will share my favorite researchers with you to lay the ground for the arrival of the Transformer.

In the early 20th century, Andrey Markov introduced the concept of random values and created a theory of stochastic processes. We know them in artificial intelligence (AI) as Markov Decision Processes (MDPs), Markov Chains, and Markov Processes....