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

Method 1: NER first

This section will use NER to help us find ideas for good questions. Transformer models are continuously trained and updated. Also, the datasets used for training might change. Finally, these are not rule-based algorithms that produce the same result each time. The outputs might change from one run to another. NER can detect persons, locations, organizations, and other entities in a sequence. We will first run a NER task that will give us some of the main parts of the paragraph we can focus on to ask questions.

Using NER to find questions

We will continue to run QA.ipynb cell by cell. The program now initializes the pipeline with the NER task to perform with the default model and tokenizer:

nlp_ner = pipeline("ner")

We will continue to use the deceivingly simple sequence we ran in the Method 0: Trial and Error section of this chapter:

sequence = "The traffic began to slow down on Pioneer Boulevard in Los Angeles, making...