Building KantaiBERT from scratch

We will build KantaiBERT in 15 steps from scratch and then run it on a masked language modeling example.

Open Google Colaboratory (you need a Gmail account). Then upload KantaiBERT.ipynb, which is on GitHub in this chapter's directory.

The titles of the 15 steps of this section are similar to the titles of the cells of the notebook, which makes it easy to follow.

Let's start by loading the dataset.

Step 1: Loading the dataset

Ready-to-use datasets provide an objective way to train and compare transformers. In Chapter 4, Downstream NLP Tasks with Transformers, we will explore several datasets. However, the goal of this chapter is to understand the training process of a transformer with notebook cells that could be run in real time without having to wait for hours to obtain a result.

I chose to use the works of Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), the German philosopher, who was the epitome of the Age of Enlightenment. The...