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

Let Your Data Do the Talking: Story, Questions, and Answers

Reading comprehension requires many skills. When we read a text, we notice the keywords and the main events and create mental representations of the content. We can then answer questions using our knowledge of the content and our representations. We also examine each question to avoid traps and making mistakes.

Transformers, no matter how powerful they have become, cannot answer open questions easily. An open environment means that somebody can ask any question on any topic, and a transformer would answer correctly. That is still impossible. Transformers often use general domain training datasets in a closed question-and-answer environment. For example, critical answers in medical care and law interpretation require additional NLP functionality.

However, transformers cannot answer any question correctly regardless of whether the training environment is closed with preprocessed question-answer sequences...