Lecture

Contextual Representations: ELMo & BERT

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Description

This lecture covers the evolution of contextualized embeddings in NLP, starting with ELMo and progressing to BERT. ELMo utilizes bidirectional LSTMs to generate word embeddings, while BERT enhances this with masked language modeling. The presentation includes detailed explanations of the training processes, architecture, and applications of both models, highlighting their significant impact on various NLP tasks. The instructor also discusses the challenges and improvements brought by models like DistilBERT and ELECTRA, showcasing the continuous advancements in contextual representation learning.

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Related concepts (32)

Transformer (machine learning model)

A transformer is a deep learning architecture that relies on the parallel multi-head attention mechanism. The modern transformer was proposed in the 2017 paper titled 'Attention Is All You Need' by Ashish Vaswani et al., Google Brain team. It is notable for requiring less training time than previous recurrent neural architectures, such as long short-term memory (LSTM), and its later variation has been prevalently adopted for training large language models on large (language) datasets, such as the Wikipedia corpus and Common Crawl, by virtue of the parallelized processing of input sequence.

Sentence embedding

In natural language processing, a sentence embedding refers to a numeric representation of a sentence in the form of a vector of real numbers which encodes meaningful semantic information. State of the art embeddings are based on the learned hidden layer representation of dedicated sentence transformer models. BERT pioneered an approach involving the use of a dedicated [CLS] token preprended to the beginning of each sentence inputted into the model; the final hidden state vector of this token encodes information about the sentence and can be fine-tuned for use in sentence classification tasks.

Word embedding

In natural language processing (NLP), a word embedding is a representation of a word. The embedding is used in text analysis. Typically, the representation is a real-valued vector that encodes the meaning of the word in such a way that words that are closer in the vector space are expected to be similar in meaning. Word embeddings can be obtained using language modeling and feature learning techniques, where words or phrases from the vocabulary are mapped to vectors of real numbers.

Large language model

A large language model (LLM) is a language model characterized by its large size. Their size is enabled by AI accelerators, which are able to process vast amounts of text data, mostly scraped from the Internet. The artificial neural networks which are built can contain from tens of millions and up to billions of weights and are (pre-)trained using self-supervised learning and semi-supervised learning. Transformer architecture contributed to faster training.

Recurrent neural network

A recurrent neural network (RNN) is one of the two broad types of artificial neural network, characterized by direction of the flow of information between its layers. In contrast to uni-directional feedforward neural network, it is a bi-directional artificial neural network, meaning that it allows the output from some nodes to affect subsequent input to the same nodes. Their ability to use internal state (memory) to process arbitrary sequences of inputs makes them applicable to tasks such as unsegmented, connected handwriting recognition or speech recognition.

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