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

Translation language modeling and cross-lingual knowledge sharing

So far, you have learned about Masked Language Modeling (MLM) as a cloze task. However, language modeling using neural networks is divided into three categories based on the approach itself and its practical usage, as follows:

  • MLM
  • Causal Language Modeling (CLM)
  • Translation Language Modeling (TLM)

It is also important to note that there are other pre-training approaches such as Next Sentence Prediction (NSP) and Sentence Order Prediction (SOP) too, but we just considered token-based language modeling. These three are the main approaches that are used in the literature. MLM, described and detailed in previous chapters, is a very close concept to a cloze task in language learning.

CLM is defined by predicting the next token, which is followed by some previous tokens. For example, if you see the following context, you can easily predict the next token:

<s&gt...