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

Semantic search with Sentence-BERT

We may already be familiar with keyword-based search (Boolean model), where, for a given keyword or pattern, we can retrieve the results that match the pattern. Alternatively, we can use regular expressions, where we can define advanced patterns such as the lexico-syntactic pattern. These traditional approaches cannot handle synonym (for example, car is the same as automobile) or word sense problems (for example, bank as the side of a river or bank as a financial institute). While the first synonym case causes low recall due to missing out the documents that shouldn't be missed, the second causes low precision due to catching the documents not to be caught. Vector-based or semantic search approaches can overcome these drawbacks by building a dense numerical representation of both queries and documents.

Let's set up a case study for Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) that are idle on websites. We will exploit FAQ resources within a semantic...