Book Image

Mastering Transformers

By : Savaş Yıldırım, Meysam Asgari- Chenaghlu
Book Image

Mastering Transformers

By: Savaş Yıldırım, Meysam Asgari- Chenaghlu

Overview of this book

Transformer-based language models have dominated natural language processing (NLP) studies and have now become a new paradigm. With this book, you'll learn how to build various transformer-based NLP applications using the Python Transformers library. The book gives you an introduction to Transformers by showing you how to write your first hello-world program. You'll then learn how a tokenizer works and how to train your own tokenizer. As you advance, you'll explore the architecture of autoencoding models, such as BERT, and autoregressive models, such as GPT. You'll see how to train and fine-tune models for a variety of natural language understanding (NLU) and natural language generation (NLG) problems, including text classification, token classification, and text representation. This book also helps you to learn efficient models for challenging problems, such as long-context NLP tasks with limited computational capacity. You'll also work with multilingual and cross-lingual problems, optimize models by monitoring their performance, and discover how to deconstruct these models for interpretability and explainability. Finally, you'll be able to deploy your transformer models in a production environment. By the end of this NLP book, you'll have learned how to use Transformers to solve advanced NLP problems using advanced models.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
1
Section 1: Introduction – Recent Developments in the Field, Installations, and Hello World Applications
4
Section 2: Transformer Models – From Autoencoding to Autoregressive Models
10
Section 3: Advanced Topics

Chapter 9:Cross-Lingual and Multilingual Language Modeling

Up to this point, you have learned a lot about transformer-based architectures, from encoder-only models to decoder-only models, from efficient transformers to long-context transformers. You also learned about semantic text representation based on a Siamese network. However, we discussed all these models in terms of monolingual problems. We assumed that these models just understand a single language and are not capable of having a general understanding of text, regardless of the language itself. In fact, some of these models have multilingual variants; Multilingual Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (mBERT), Multilingual Text-to-Text Transfer Transformer (mT5), and Multilingual Bidirectional and Auto-Regressive Transformer (mBART), to name but a few. On the other hand, some models are specifically designed for multilingual purposes trained with cross-lingual objectives. For example, Cross-lingual Language...