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

Cross-lingual classification

So far, you have learned that cross-lingual models are capable of understanding different languages in semantic vector space where similar sentences, regardless of their language, are close in terms of vector distance. But how it is possible to use this capability in use cases where we have few samples available?

For example, you are trying to develop an intent classification for a chatbot in which there are few samples or no samples available for the second language; but for the first language—let's say English—you do have enough samples. In such cases, it is possible to freeze the cross-lingual model itself and just train a classifier for the task. A trained classifier can be tested on a second language instead of the language it is trained on.

In this section, you will learn how to train a cross-lingual model in English for text classification and test it in other languages. We have selected a very low-resource language known...