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)
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Index

Downstream NLP Tasks with Transformers

Transformers reveal their full potential when we unleash pretrained models and watch them perform downstream Natural Language Understanding (NLU) tasks. It takes a lot of time and effort to pretrain and fine-tune a transformer model, but the effort is worthwhile when we see a 355 million parameter transformer model in action on a range of NLU tasks.

We will begin this chapter with the quest to outperform the human baseline. The human baseline represents the performance of humans on an NLU task. Humans learn transduction at an early age and quickly develop inductive thinking. We humans perceive the world directly with our senses. Machine intelligence relies entirely on our perceptions transcribed into words to make sense of our language.

We will then see how to measure the performances of transformers. Measuring NLP tasks remains a straightforward approach involving accuracy scores in various forms based on true and false results. These...