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

Text summarization

Text summarization is the process of converting a long text into its summary. Suppose we have a Wikipedia article and say we don't want to read the whole article – we just need an overview of the article. In this case, summarizing the Wikipedia article will help us get an overview of the article. Text summarization is widely used for a variety of applications, from summarizing long documents, news articles, blog posts, ranging to many more. In the text summarization task, given a long text, our goal is to convert the given long text into its summary as shown in the figure:

Figure 6.1 – Text summarization

Text summarization is of two types:

  • Extractive summarization
  • Abstractive summarization

Now let's explore extractive and abstractive summarization in detail.

Extractive summarization

In extractive summarization, we create a summary from a given text by extracting only the important sentences.

That is, say we are given a long document containing...