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

Designing a universal text-to-text model

Google's NLP technical revolution started with Vaswani et al. (2017), the original Transformer, in 2017. "Attention is All You Need" toppled 30+ years of artificial intelligence belief in RNNs and CNNs applied to NLP tasks. It took us from the stone age of NLP/NLU to the 21st century in a long-overdue evolution.

Chapter 6, Text Generation with OpenAI GPT-2 and GPT-3 Models, summed up a second revolution that boiled up and erupted between Google's Vaswani et al. (2017) original Transformer and OpenAI's Brown et al. (2020) GPT-3 transformers. The original Transformer was focused on performance to prove that attention was all we needed for NLP/NLU tasks.

OpenAI's second revolution, through GPT-3, focused on taking transformer models from fine-tuning pretrained models to few-shot trained models that required no fine-tuning. The second revolution was to show that a machine can learn a language and apply it to...