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

Tracking model metrics

So far, we have trained language models and simply analyzed the final results. We have not observed the training process or made a comparison of training using different options. In this section, we will briefly discuss how to monitor model training. For this, we will handle how to track the training of the models we developed before in Chapter 5, Fine-Tuning Language Models for Text Classification.

There are two important tools developed in this area—one is TensorBoard, and the other is W&B. With the former, we save the training results to a local drive and visualize them at the end of the experiment. With the latter, we are able to monitor the model-training progress live in a cloud platform.

This section will be a short introduction to these tools without going into much detail about them, as this is beyond the scope of this chapter.

Let's start with TensorBoard.

Tracking model training with TensorBoard

TensorBoard is a visualization...