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

Installing Transformer with Anaconda

Anaconda is a distribution of the Python and R programming languages that makes package distribution and deployment easy for scientific computation. In this chapter, we will describe the installation of the Transformer library. However, it is also possible to install this library without the aid of Anaconda. The main motivation to use Anaconda is to explain the process more easily and moderate the packages used.

To start installing the related libraries, the installation of Anaconda is a mandatory step. Official guidelines provided by the Anaconda documentation offer simple steps to install it for common operating systems (macOS, Windows, and Linux).

Installation on Linux

Many distributions of Linux are available for users to enjoy, but among them, Ubuntu is one of the preferred ones. In this section, the steps to install Anaconda are covered for Linux. Proceed as follows:

  1. Download the Anaconda installer for Linux from https://www...