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

Working with benchmarks and datasets

Before introducing the datasets library, we'd better talk about important benchmarks such as General Language Understanding Evalution (GLUE), Cross-lingual TRansfer Evaluation of Multilingual Encoders (XTREME), and Stanford Question Answering Dataset (SquAD). Benchmarking is especially critical for transferring learnings within multitask and multilingual environments. In NLP, we mostly focus on a particular metric that is a performance score on a certain task or dataset. Thanks to the Transformer library, we are able to transfer what we have learned from a particular task to a related task, which is called Transfer Learning (TL). By transferring representations between related problems, we are able to train general-purpose models that share common linguistic knowledge across tasks, also known as Multi-Task Learning (MTL). Another aspect of TL is to transfer knowledge across natural languages (multilingual models).

Important benchmarks

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