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

Semantic Role Labeling with BERT-Based Transformers

Transformers have made more progress in the past few years than NLP in the past generation. Standard NLU approaches first learn syntactical and lexical features to explain the structure of a sentence. The former NLP models would be trained to understand the basic syntax of language before running Semantic Role Labeling (SRL).

Shi and Lin (2019) start their paper by asking if preliminary syntactic and lexical training can be skipped. Can a BERT-based model perform SRL without going through those classical training phases? The answer is yes!

Shi and Lin (2019) suggest that SRL can be considered as sequence labeling and provide a standardized input format. Their BERT-based model produced surprisingly good results.

In this chapter, we will use a pretrained BERT-based model provided by the Allen Institute for AI based on the Shi and Lin (2019) paper. Shi and Lin took SRL to the next level by dropping syntactic and lexical...