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 off the chapter by understanding what the transformer model is and how it uses encoder-decoder architecture. We looked into the encoder section of the transformer and learned about different sublayers used in encoders, such as multi-head attention and feedforward networks.

We learned that the self-attention mechanism relates a word to all the words in the sentence to better understand the word. To compute self-attention, we used three different matrices, called the query, key, and value matrices. Following this, we learned how to compute positional encoding and how it is used to capture the word order in a sentence. Next, we learned how the feedforward network works in the encoder and then we explored the add and norm component.

After understanding the encoder, we understood how the decoder works. We explored three sublayers used in the decoder in detail, which are the masked multi-head attention, encoder-decoder attention, and feedforward network. Following this...