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

Extracting embeddings from all encoder layers of BERT

We learned how to extract the embedding from the pre-trained BERT model in the previous section. We learned that they are the embeddings obtained from the final encoder layer. Now the question is, should we consider the embeddings obtained only from the final encoder layer (final hidden state), or should we also consider the embeddings obtained from all the encoder layers (all hidden states)? Let's explore this.

Let's represent the input embedding layer with , the first encoder layer (first hidden layer) with , the second encoder layer (second hidden layer) with , and so on to the final twelfth encoder layer, , as shown in the following figure:

Figure 3.4 – Pre-trained BERT

Instead of taking the embeddings (representations) only from the final encoder layer, the researchers of BERT have experimented with taking embeddings from different encoder layers.

For instance, for NER task, the researchers have used the pre...