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

Summary

With this, we now come to the end of the chapter. You should now have an understanding of the evolution of NLP methods and approaches, from BoW to Transformers. We looked at how to implement BoW-, RNN-, and CNN-based approaches and understood what Word2vec is and how it helps improve the conventional DL-based methods using shallow TL. We also looked into the foundation of the Transformer architecture, with BERT as an example. By the end of the chapter, we had learned about TL and how it is utilized by BERT.

At this point, we have learned basic information that is necessary to continue to the next chapters. We understood the main idea behind Transformer-based architectures and how TL can be applied using this architecture.

In the next section, we will see how it is possible to run a simple Transformer example from scratch. The related information about the installation steps will be given, and working with datasets and benchmarks is also investigated in detail.