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

Fine-tuning language models for NER

In this section, we will learn how to fine-tune BERT for an NER task. We first start with the datasets library and by loading the conll2003 dataset.

The dataset card is accessible at https://huggingface.co/datasets/conll2003. The following screenshot shows this model card from the HuggingFace website:

Figure 6.4 – CONLL2003 dataset card from HuggingFace

From this screenshot, it can be seen that the model is trained on this dataset and is currently available and listed in the right panel. However, there are also descriptions of the dataset such as its size and its characteristics:

  1. To load the dataset, the following commands are used:
    import datasets
    conll2003 = datasets.load_dataset("conll2003")

    A download progress bar will appear and after finishing the downloading and caching, the dataset will be ready to use. The following screenshot shows the progress bars:

    Figure 6.5 – Downloading and preparing...