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

AR language model training

In this section, you will learn how it is possible to train your own AR language models. We will start with GPT-2 and get a deeper look inside its different functions for training, using the transformers library.

You can find any specific corpus to train your own GPT-2, but for this example, we used Emma by Jane Austen, which is a romantic novel. Training on a much bigger corpus is highly recommended to have a more general language generation.

Before we start, it's good to note that we used TensorFlow's native training functionality to show that all Hugging Face models can be directly trained on TensorFlow or PyTorch if you wish to. Follow these steps:

  1. You can download the Emma novel raw text by using the following command:
    wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/teropa/nlp/master/resources/corpora/gutenberg/austen-emma.txt
  2. The first step is to train the BytePairEncoding tokenizer for GPT-2 on a corpus that you intend to train your...