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

Machine Translation with the Transformer

Humans master sequence transduction, transferring a representation to another object. We can easily imagine a mental representation of a sequence. If somebody says, "The flowers in my garden are beautiful," we can easily visualize a garden with flowers in it. We see images of the garden, although we might never have seen that garden. We might even imagine chirping birds and the scent of flowers.

A machine has to learn transduction from scratch with numerical representations. Recurrent or convolutional approaches have produced interesting results but have not reached significant BLEU translation evaluation scores. Translating requires the representation of language A transposed into language B.

The Transformer model's self-attention innovation increases the analytic ability of machine intelligence. A sequence in language A is adequately represented before attempting to translate it into language B. Self-attention brings...