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
Other Books You May Enjoy
14
Index

Preprocessing a WMT dataset

Vaswani et al. (2017) present the Transformer's achievements on the WMT 2014 English-to-German translation task and the WMT 2014 English-to-French translation task. The Transformer achieves a state-of-the-art BLEU score. BLEU will be described in the Evaluating machine translation with BLEU section of this chapter.

The 2014 Workshop on Machine Translation (WMT) contained several European language datasets. One of the datasets contained data taken from version 7 of the Europarl corpus. We will be using the French-English dataset from the European Parliament Proceedings Parallel Corpus 1996-2011. The link is https://www.statmt.org/europarl/v7/fr-en.tgz.

Once you have downloaded the files and have extracted them, we will preprocess the two parallel files:

  • europarl-v7.fr-en.en
  • europarl-v7.fr-en.fr

We will load, clear, and reduce the size of the corpus.

Let's start the preprocessing.

Preprocessing the raw data...