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

Chapter 7, Applying BERT to Other Languages

  1. Multilingual BERT, or M-BERT for short, is used to obtain the representation of text in different languages and not just English.
  2. Similar to BERT, M-BERT is also trained with masked language modeling and next-sentence prediction tasks, but instead of using only English language Wikipedia text, M-BERT is trained using Wikipedia text in 104 different languages.
  3. M-BERT works better for languages that have a shared word order (SVO-SVO, SOV-SOV) than for languages that have different word order (SVO-SOV, SOV-SVO).
  4. Mixing or alternating different languages in a conversation is called code-switching. In transliteration, instead of writing text in the source language script, we use the target language script.
  5. The XLM model is pre-trained using casual language modeling, masked language modeling, and translation language modeling tasks.
  6. Translation language modeling (TLM) is an interesting pre-training strategy. In casual language modeling and masked...