Book Image

Mastering Transformers

By : Savaş Yıldırım, Meysam Asgari- Chenaghlu
Book Image

Mastering Transformers

By: Savaş Yıldırım, Meysam Asgari- Chenaghlu

Overview of this book

Transformer-based language models have dominated natural language processing (NLP) studies and have now become a new paradigm. With this book, you'll learn how to build various transformer-based NLP applications using the Python Transformers library. The book gives you an introduction to Transformers by showing you how to write your first hello-world program. You'll then learn how a tokenizer works and how to train your own tokenizer. As you advance, you'll explore the architecture of autoencoding models, such as BERT, and autoregressive models, such as GPT. You'll see how to train and fine-tune models for a variety of natural language understanding (NLU) and natural language generation (NLG) problems, including text classification, token classification, and text representation. This book also helps you to learn efficient models for challenging problems, such as long-context NLP tasks with limited computational capacity. You'll also work with multilingual and cross-lingual problems, optimize models by monitoring their performance, and discover how to deconstruct these models for interpretability and explainability. Finally, you'll be able to deploy your transformer models in a production environment. By the end of this NLP book, you'll have learned how to use Transformers to solve advanced NLP problems using advanced models.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
1
Section 1: Introduction – Recent Developments in the Field, Installations, and Hello World Applications
4
Section 2: Transformer Models – From Autoencoding to Autoregressive Models
10
Section 3: Advanced Topics

Fundamental limitations of multilingual models

Although the multilingual and cross-lingual models are promising and will affect the direction of NLP work, they still have some limitations. Many recent works addressed these limitations. Currently, the mBERT model slightly underperforms in many tasks compared with its monolingual counterparts and may not be a potential substitute for a well-trained monolingual model, which is why monolingual models are still widely used.

Studies in the field indicate that multilingual models suffer from the so-called curse of multilingualism as they seek to appropriately represent all languages. Adding new languages to a multilingual model improves its performance, up to a certain point. However, it is also seen that adding it after this point degrades performance, which may be due to shared vocabulary. Compared to monolingual models, multilingual models are significantly more limited in terms of the parameter budget. They need to allocate their vocabulary...