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

Introduction to text classification

Text classification (also known as text categorization) is a way of mapping a document (sentence, Twitter post, book chapter, email content, and so on) to a category out of a predefined list (classes). In the case of two classes that have positive and negative labels, we call this binary classification – more specifically, sentiment analysis. For more than two classes, we call this multi-class classification, where the classes are mutually exclusive, or multi-label classification, where the classes are not mutually exclusive, which means a document can receive more than one label. For instance, the content of a news article may be related to sport and politics at the same time. Beyond this classification, we may want to score the documents in a range of [-1,1] or rank them in a range of [1-5]. We can solve this kind of problem with a regression model, where the type of the output is numeric, not categorical.

Luckily, the transformer architecture...