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

XLM and mBERT

We have picked two models to explain in this section: mBERT and XLM. We selected these models because they correspond to the two best multilingual types as of writing this article. mBERT is a multilingual model trained on a different corpus of various languages using MLM modeling. It can operate separately for many languages. On the other hand, XLM is trained on different corpora using MLM, CLM, and TLM language modeling, and can solve cross-lingual tasks. For instance, it can measure the similarity of the sentences in two different languages by mapping them in a common vector space, which is not possible with mBERT.

mBERT

You are familiar with the BERT autoencoder model from Chapter 3, Autoencoding Language Models, and how to train it using MLM on a specified corpus. Imagine a case where a wide and huge corpus is provided not from a single language, but from 104 languages instead. Training on such a corpus would result in a multilingual version of BERT. However...