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

Preface

We've seen big changes in Natural Language Processing (NLP) over the last 20 years. During this time, we have experienced different paradigms and finally entered a new era dominated by the magical transformer architecture. This deep learning architecture has come about by inheriting many approaches. Contextual word embeddings, multi-head self-attention, positional encoding, parallelizable architectures, model compression, transfer learning, and cross-lingual models are among those approaches. Starting with the help of various neural-based NLP approaches, the transformer architecture gradually evolved into an attention-based encoder-decoder architecture and continues to evolve to this day. Now, we are seeing new successful variants of this architecture in the literature. Great models have emerged that use only the encoder part of it, such as BERT, or only the decoder part of it, such as GPT.

Throughout the book, we will touch on these NLP approaches and will be able to work with transformer models easily thanks to the Transformers library from the Hugging Face community. We will provide the solutions step by step to a wide variety of NLP problems, ranging from summarization to question-answering. We will see that we can achieve state-of-the-art results with the help of transformers.