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

Understanding BART

BART is another interesting model introduced by Facebook AI. It is based on the transformer architecture. The BART model is essentially a denoising autoencoder. It is trained by reconstructing corrupted text.

Just like the BERT model, we can use the pre-trained BART model and fine-tune it for several downstream tasks. The BART model is best suited to text generation. It is also used for other tasks such as language translation and comprehension. The researchers have also shown that the performance of BART is equivalent to that of the RoBERTa model. But how exactly does BART work? What's special about BART? How does it differ from BERT? Let's find out the answers to all these questions in the next section.

Architecture of BART

BART is essentially a transformer model with an encoder and a decoder. We feed corrupted text to the encoder and the encoder learns the representation of the given text and sends the representation to the decoder. The decoder takes...