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

Summary

In this chapter, we discussed how to fine-tune a pretrained model to any token classification task. Fine-tuning models on NER and QA problems were explored. Using the pretrained and fine-tuned models on specific tasks with pipelines was detailed with examples. We also learned about various preprocessing steps for these two tasks. Saving pretrained models that are fine-tuned on specific tasks was another major learning point of this chapter. We also saw how it is possible to train models with a limited input size on tasks such as QA that have longer sequence sizes than the model input. Using tokenizers more efficiently to have document splitting with document stride was another important item in this chapter too.

In the next chapter, we will discuss text representation methods using Transformers. By studying the chapter, you will learn how to perform zero-/few-shot learning and semantic text clustering.