Book Image

Mastering NLP from Foundations to LLMs

By : Lior Gazit, Meysam Ghaffari
Book Image

Mastering NLP from Foundations to LLMs

By: Lior Gazit, Meysam Ghaffari

Overview of this book

Do you want to master Natural Language Processing (NLP) but don’t know where to begin? This book will give you the right head start. Written by leaders in machine learning and NLP, Mastering NLP from Foundations to LLMs provides an in-depth introduction to techniques. Starting with the mathematical foundations of machine learning (ML), you’ll gradually progress to advanced NLP applications such as large language models (LLMs) and AI applications. You’ll get to grips with linear algebra, optimization, probability, and statistics, which are essential for understanding and implementing machine learning and NLP algorithms. You’ll also explore general machine learning techniques and find out how they relate to NLP. Next, you’ll learn how to preprocess text data, explore methods for cleaning and preparing text for analysis, and understand how to do text classification. You’ll get all of this and more along with complete Python code samples. By the end of the book, the advanced topics of LLMs’ theory, design, and applications will be discussed along with the future trends in NLP, which will feature expert opinions. You’ll also get to strengthen your practical skills by working on sample real-world NLP business problems and solutions.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)

Different types of LLMs

LLMs are generally neural network architectures that are trained on a large corpus of text data. The term “large” refers to the size of these models in terms of the number of parameters and the scale of training data. Here are some examples of LLMs.

Transformer models

Transformer models have been at the forefront of the recent wave of LLMs. They are based on the “Transformer” architecture, which uses self-attention mechanisms to weigh the relevance of different words in the input when making predictions. Transformers are a type of neural network architecture introduced in the paper Attention is All You Need by Vaswani et al. One of their significant advantages, particularly for training LLMs, is their suitability for parallel computing.

In traditional RNN models, such as LSTM and GRU, the sequence of tokens (words, subwords, or characters in the text) must be processed sequentially. That’s because each token’...