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

Training the BERTSUM model

The code for training the BERTSUM model is open-sourced by the researchers of BERTSUM and it is available at https://github.com/nlpyang/BertSum. In this section, let's explore this and learn how to train the BERTSUM model. We will train the BERTSUM model on the CNN/DailyMail news dataset. We can also access the complete code from the GitHub repository of the book. In order to run the code smoothly, clone the GitHub repository of the book and run the code using Google Colab.

First, let's install the necessary libraries:

!pip install pytorch-pre-trained-bert
!pip install torch==1.1.0 pytorch_transformers tensorboardX multiprocess pyrouge
!pip install googleDriveFileDownloader

If you are working with Google Colab, switch to the content directory with the following code:

cd /content/

Clone the BERTSUM repository:

!git clone https://github.com/nlpyang/BertSum.git

Now switch to the bert_data directory:

cd /content/BertSum/bert_data/

The researchers have...