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

Summary

We started the chapter by learning how VideoBERT works. We learned how VideoBERT is pre-trained by predicting the masked language and visual tokens. We also learned that VideoBERT's final pre-training objective function is the weighted combination of text-only, video-only, and text-video methods. Later, we explored different applications of VideoBERT.

Then, we learned that BART is essentially a transformer model with an encoder and an 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 the representation produced by the encoder and reconstructs the original uncorrupted text. We also saw that BART uses a bidirectional encoder and a unidirectional decoder.

We also explored different noising techniques, such as token masking, token deletion, token infilling, sentence shuffling, and document rotation, in detail. Then, we learned how to perform text summarization...