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

Understanding other autoencoding models

In this part, we will review autoencoding model alternatives that slightly modify the original BERT. These alternative re-implementations have led to better downstream tasks by exploiting many sources: optimizing the pre-training process and the number of layers or heads, improving data quality, designing better objective functions, and so forth. The source of improvements roughly falls into two parts: better architectural design choice and pre-training control.

Many effective alternatives have been shared lately, so it is impossible to understand and explain them all here. We can take a look at some of the most cited models in the literature and the most used ones on NLP benchmarks. Let's start with Albert as a re-implementation of BERT that focuses especially on architectural design choice.

Introducing ALBERT

The performance of language models is considered to improve as their size gets bigger. However, training such models...