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 saw how the T5 transformer models standardized the input of the encoder and decoder stacks of the original Transformer. The original Transformer architecture has an identical structure for each block (or layer) of the encoder and decoder stacks. However, the original Transformer did not have a standardized input format for NLP tasks.

Raffel et al. (2018) designed a standard input for a wide range of NLP tasks by defining a text-to-text model. They added a prefix to an input sequence, which indicated the type of NLP problem to solve. This leads to a standard text-to-text format. The Text-To-Text Transfer Transformer (T5) was born. We saw that this deceivingly simple evolution made it possible to use the same model and hyperparameters for a wide range of NLP tasks. The invention of T5 takes the standardization process of transformer models a step further.

We then implemented a T5 model that could summarize any text. We tested the model on texts...