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 built KantaiBERT, a RoBERTa-like model transformer, from scratch using the construction blocks provided by Hugging Face.

We first started by loading a customized dataset on a specific topic related to the works of Immanuel Kant. You can load an existing dataset or create your own depending on your goals. We saw that using a customized dataset provides insights into the way a transformer model thinks. However, this experimental approach has its limits. It would take a much larger dataset to train a model beyond educational purposes.

The KantaiBERT project was used to train a tokenizer on the kant.txt dataset. The trained merges.txt and vocab.json files were saved. A tokenizer was recreated with our pretrained files. KantaiBERT built the customized dataset and defined a data collator to process the training batches for backpropagation. The trainer was initialized, and we explored the parameters of the RoBERTa model in detail. The model was trained...