Book Image

Transformers for Natural Language Processing

By : Denis Rothman
Book Image

Transformers for Natural Language Processing

By: Denis Rothman

Overview of this book

The transformer architecture has proved to be revolutionary in outperforming the classical RNN and CNN models in use today. With an apply-as-you-learn approach, Transformers for Natural Language Processing investigates in vast detail the deep learning for machine translations, speech-to-text, text-to-speech, language modeling, question answering, and many more NLP domains with transformers. The book takes you through NLP with Python and examines various eminent models and datasets within the transformer architecture created by pioneers such as Google, Facebook, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Hugging Face. The book trains you in three stages. The first stage introduces you to transformer architectures, starting with the original transformer, before moving on to RoBERTa, BERT, and DistilBERT models. You will discover training methods for smaller transformers that can outperform GPT-3 in some cases. In the second stage, you will apply transformers for Natural Language Understanding (NLU) and Natural Language Generation (NLG). Finally, the third stage will help you grasp advanced language understanding techniques such as optimizing social network datasets and fake news identification. By the end of this NLP book, you will understand transformers from a cognitive science perspective and be proficient in applying pretrained transformer models by tech giants to various datasets.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
13
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14
Index

Transduction and the inductive inheritance of transformers

Transformers possess the unique ability to apply their knowledge to tasks they did not learn. A BERT transformer, for example, acquires language through sequence-to-sequence and masked language modeling. The BERT transformer can then be fine-tuned to perform downstream tasks that it did not learn from scratch.

In this section, we will do a mind experiment. We will use the graph of a transformer to represent how humans and machines make sense of information using language. Machines make sense of information in a different way from humans but reach very efficient results.

The following figure, a mind experiment designed in transformer architecture layers and sub-layers, shows the deceptive similarity between humans and machines. Let's study the learning process of transformer models to understand downstream tasks.

Figure 4.1: Human and machine learning methods

For our example, N=2. This conceptual representation...