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

BERT – one of the autoencoding language models

Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers, also known as BERT, was one of the first autoencoding language models to utilize the encoder Transformer stack with slight modifications for language modeling.

The BERT architecture is a multilayer Transformer encoder based on the Transformer original implementation. The Transformer model itself was originally for machine translation tasks, but the main improvement made by BERT is the utilization of this part of the architecture to provide better language modeling. This language model, after pretraining, is able to provide a global understanding of the language it is trained on.

BERT language model pretraining tasks

To have a clear understanding of the masked language modeling used by BERT, let's define it with more details. Masked language modeling is the task of training a model on input (a sentence with some masked tokens) and obtaining the output as the whole...