Transformers – Improving Natural Language Processing with Attention Mechanisms
In the previous chapter, we learned about recurrent neural networks (RNNs) and their applications in natural language processing (NLP) through a sentiment analysis project. However, a new architecture has recently emerged that has been shown to outperform the RNN-based sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) models in several NLP tasks. This is the so-called transformer architecture.
Transformers have revolutionized natural language processing and have been at the forefront of many impressive applications ranging from automated language translation (https://ai.googleblog.com/2020/06/recent-advances-in-google-translate.html) and modeling fundamental properties of protein sequences (https://www.pnas.org/content/118/15/e2016239118.short) to creating an AI that helps people write code (https://github.blog/2021-06-29-introducing-github-copilot-ai-pair-programmer).
In this chapter, you will learn about...