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

Summary

In this chapter, we first got started by examining the mind-blowing long-distance dependencies transformer architectures can uncover. Transformers can perform transduction from written and oral sequences to meaningful representations as never before in the history of Natural Language Understanding (NLU).

These two dimensions, the expansion of transduction and the simplification of implementation, are taking artificial intelligence to a level never seen before.

We explored the bold approach of removing RNNs, LSTMs, and CNNs from transduction problems and sequence modeling to build the Transformer architecture. The symmetrical design of the standardized dimensions of the encoder and decoder makes the flow from one sub-layer to another nearly seamless.

We saw that beyond removing recurrent network models, transformers introduce parallelized layers that reduce training time. We discovered other innovations, such as positional encoding and masked multi-headed attention...