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 Seq2Seq models

The left encoder and the right decoder part of the transformer are connected with cross-attention, which helps each decoder layer attend over the final encoder layer. This naturally pushes models toward producing output that closely ties to the original input. A Seq2Seq model, which is the original transformer, achieves this by using the following scheme:

Input tokens-> embeddings-> encoder-> decoder-> output tokens

Seq2Seq models keep the encoder and decoder part of the transformer. T5, Bidirectional and Auto-Regressive Transformer (BART), and Pre-training with Extracted Gap-sentences for Abstractive Summarization Sequence-to-Sequence models (PEGASUS) are among the popular Seq2Seq models.

T5

Most NLP architectures, ranging from Word2Vec to transformers learn embeddings and other parameters by predicting the masked words using context (neighbor) words. We treat NLP problems as word prediction problems. Some studies cast almost all...