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

Question answering using token classification

A QA problem is generally defined as an NLP problem with a given text and a question for AI, and getting an answer back. Usually, this answer can be found in the original text but there are different approaches to this problem. In the case of Visual Question Answering (VQA), the question is about a visual entity or visual concept rather than text but the question itself is in the form of text.

Some examples of VQA are as follows:

Figure 6.10 – VQA examples

Most of the models that are intended to be used in VQA are multimodal models that can understand the visual context along with the question and generate the answer properly. However, unimodal fully textual QA or just QA is based on textual context and textual questions with respective textual answers:

  1. SQUAD is one of the most well-known datasets in the field of QA. To see examples of SQUAD and examine them, you can use the following code:
    from...