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

fastAPI Transformer model serving

There are many web frameworks we can use for serving. Sanic, Flask, and fastAPI are just some examples. However, fastAPI has recently gained so much attention because of its speed and reliability. In this section, we will use fastAPI and learn how to build a service according to its documentation. We will also use pydantic to define our data classes. Let's begin!

  1. Before we start, we must install pydantic and fastAPI:
    $ pip install pydantic
    $ pip install fastapi
  2. The next step is to make the data model for decorating the input of the API using pydantic. But before forming the data model, we must know what our model is and identify its input.

    We are going to use a Question Answering (QA) model for this. As you know from Chapter 6, Fine-Tuning Language Models for Token Classification, the input is in the form of a question and a context.

  3. By using the following data model, you can make the QA data model:
    from pydantic import BaseModel...