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 explored SRL. SRL tasks are difficult for both humans and machines. Transformer models have shown that human baselines can be reached for many NLP topics to a certain extent.

We found that a simple BERT-based transformer can perform predicate sense disambiguation. We ran a simple transformer that could identify the meaning of a verb (predicate) without lexical or syntactic labeling. Shi and Lin (2019) used a standard "sentence + verb" input format to train their BERT-based transformer.

We found that a transformer trained with a stripped-down "sentence + predicate" input could solve simple and complex problems. The limits were reached when we used relatively rare verb forms. However, these limits are not final. If difficult problems are added to the training dataset, the research team could improve the model.

We also discovered that AI for the good of humanity exists. The Allen Institute for AI has made many free AI resources...