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

Chapter 3: Autoencoding Language Models

In the previous chapter, we looked at and studied how a typical Transformer model can be used by HuggingFace's Transformers. So far, all the topics have included how to use pre-defined or pre-built models and less information has been given about specific models and their training.

In this chapter, we will gain knowledge of how we can train autoencoding language models on any given language from scratch. This training will include pre-training and task-specific training of the models. First, we will start with basic knowledge about the BERT model and how it works. Then we will train the language model using a simple and small corpus. Afterward, we will look at how the model can be used inside any Keras model.

For an overview of what will be learned in this chapter, we will discuss the following topics:

  • BERT – one of the autoencoding language models
  • Autoencoding language model training for any language
  • Sharing...