Book Image

Getting Started with Google BERT

By : Sudharsan Ravichandiran
Book Image

Getting Started with Google BERT

By: Sudharsan Ravichandiran

Overview of this book

BERT (bidirectional encoder representations from transformer) has revolutionized the world of natural language processing (NLP) with promising results. This book is an introductory guide that will help you get to grips with Google's BERT architecture. With a detailed explanation of the transformer architecture, this book will help you understand how the transformer’s encoder and decoder work. You’ll explore the BERT architecture by learning how the BERT model is pre-trained and how to use pre-trained BERT for downstream tasks by fine-tuning it for NLP tasks such as sentiment analysis and text summarization with the Hugging Face transformers library. As you advance, you’ll learn about different variants of BERT such as ALBERT, RoBERTa, and ELECTRA, and look at SpanBERT, which is used for NLP tasks like question answering. You'll also cover simpler and faster BERT variants based on knowledge distillation such as DistilBERT and TinyBERT. The book takes you through MBERT, XLM, and XLM-R in detail and then introduces you to sentence-BERT, which is used for obtaining sentence representation. Finally, you'll discover domain-specific BERT models such as BioBERT and ClinicalBERT, and discover an interesting variant called VideoBERT. By the end of this BERT book, you’ll be well-versed with using BERT and its variants for performing practical NLP tasks.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
1
Section 1 - Starting Off with BERT
5
Section 2 - Exploring BERT Variants
8
Section 3 - Applications of BERT

Learning language and video representations with VideoBERT

In this section, we will learn about yet another interesting variant of BERT called VideoBERT. As the name suggests, along with learning the representation of language, VideoBERT also learns the representation of video. It is the first model that learns the representation of both video and language in a joint manner.

Just as we used a pre-trained BERT model and fine-tuned it for downstream tasks, we can also use a pre-trained VideoBERT model and fine-tune it for many interesting downstream tasks. VideoBERT is used for tasks such as image caption generation, video captioning, predicting the next frames of a video, and more.

But how exactly is VideoBERT pre-trained to learn video and language representations? Let's find out in the next section.

Pre-training a VideoBERT model

We know that the BERT model is pre-trained using two tasks, called masked language modeling (cloze task) and next sentence prediction. Can we also...