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
Getting Hands-On with BERT

In this chapter, we will learn how to use the pre-trained BERT model in detail. First, we will look at the different configurations of the pre-trained BERT model open sourced by Google. Then, we will learn how to use the pre-trained BERT model as a feature extractor. We will also explore Hugging Face's transformers library and learn how to use it to extract embeddings from the pre-trained BERT.

Moving on, we will understand how to extract embeddings from all encoder layers of BERT. Next, we will learn how to fine-tune the pre-trained BERT model for the downstream tasks. First, we will learn to fine-tune the pre-trained BERT model for a text classification task. Next, we will learn to fine-tune BERT for sentiment analysis tasks using the transformers library. Then, we will look into fine-tuning the pre-trained BERT model for natural language inference...