Introduction to PyTorch-Transformers: An Incredible Library for State-of-the-Art NLP (with Python code)

Installing PyTorch-Transformers on our Machine Predicting the next word using GPT-2 Natural Language Generation GPT-2 Transformer-XL XLNet Training a Masked Language Model for BERT Analytics Vidhya’s Take on PyTorch-Transformers   Demystifying State-of-the-Art in NLP Essentially, Natural Language Processing is about teaching computers to understand the intricacies of human language.

Before we get into the technical details of PyTorch-Transformers, let’s quickly revisit the very concept on which the library is built – NLP.

We’ll also understand what state-of-the-art means as that will set the context for the article.

Here are a few things that you need to know before we start with PyTorch-Transformers: State-of-the-Art means an algorithm or a technique that is currently the “best” for a task.

When we say “best”, we mean these are the algorithms pioneered by giants like Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Amazon NLP has many well-defined tasks that researchers are studying to create intelligent techniques to solve them.

Some of the most popular tasks are Language Translation, Text Summarization, Question Answering systems, etc.

Deep Learning techniques like Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs), Sequence2Sequence, Attention, and Word Embeddings (Glove, Word2Vec) have previously been the State-of-the-Art for NLP tasks These techniques were superseded by a framework called Transformers that is behind almost all of the current State-of-the-Art NLP models Note: This article is going to be full of Transformers so I’d highly recommend that you read the below guide in case you need a quick refresher: How do Transformers Work in NLP?.A Guide to the Latest State-of-the-Art Models   What is PyTorch-Transformers?.PyTorch-Transformers is a library of state-of-the-art pre-trained models for Natural Language Processing (NLP).

I have taken this section from PyTorch-Transformers’ documentation.

This library currently contains PyTorch implementations, pre-trained model weights, usage scripts and conversion utilities for the following models: BERT (from Google) released with the paper BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding GPT (from OpenAI) released with the paper Improving Language Understanding by Generative Pre-Training GPT-2 (from OpenAI) released with the paper Language Models are Unsupervised Multitask Learners Transformer-XL (from Google/CMU) released with the paper Transformer-XL: Attentive Language Models Beyond a Fixed-Length Context XLNet (from Google/CMU) released with the paper XLNet: Generalized Autoregressive Pretraining for Language Understanding XLM (from Facebook) released together with the paper Cross-lingual Language Model Pretraining All of the above models are the best in class for various NLP tasks.

Some of these models are as recent as the previous month!.Most of the State-of-the-Art models require tons of training data and days of training on expensive GPU hardware which is something only the big technology companies and research labs can afford.

But with the launch of PyTorch-Transformers, now anyone can utilize the power of State-of-the-Art models!.  Installing PyTorch-Transformers on your Machine Installing Pytorch-Transformers is pretty straightforward in Python.

You can just use pip install: pip install pytorch-transformers or if you are working on Colab: !pip install pytorch-transformers Since most of these models are GPU heavy, I would suggest working with Google Colab for this article.

Note: The code in this article is written using the PyTorch framework.

  Predicting the next word using GPT-2 Because PyTorch-Transformers supports many NLP models that are trained for Language Modelling, it easily allows for natural language generation tasks like sentence completion.

In February 2019, OpenAI created quite the storm through their release of a new transformer-based language model called GPT-2.

GPT-2 is a transformer-based generative language model that was trained on 40GB of curated text from the internet.

Being trained in an unsupervised manner, it simply learns to predict a sequence of most likely tokens (i.

e.

words) that follow a given prompt, based on the patterns it learned to recognize through its training.

Let’s build our own sentence completion model using GPT-2.

We’ll try to predict the next word in the sentence: what is the fastest car in the _________ I chose this example because this is the first suggestion that Google’s text completion gives.

Here is the code for doing the same: View the code on Gist.

The code is straightforward.

We tokenize and index the text as a sequence of numbers and pass it to the GPT2LMHeadModel.

This is nothing but the GPT2 model transformer with a language modeling head on top (linear layer with weights tied to the input embeddings).

Awesome!.The model successfully predicts the next word as “world”.

This is pretty amazing as this is what Google was suggesting.

I recommend you try this model with different input sentences and see how it performs while predicting the next word in a sentence.

  Natural Language Generation using GPT-2, Transformer-XL and XLNet Let’s take Text Generation to the next level now.

Instead of predicting only the next word, we will generate a paragraph of text based on the given input.

Let’s see what output our models give for the following input text: In a shocking finding, scientist discovered a herd of unicorns living in a remote, previously unexplored valley, in the Andes Mountains.

Even more surprising to the researchers was the fact that the unicorns spoke perfect English.

We will be using the readymade script that PyTorch-Transformers provides for this task.

Let’s clone their repository first: !git clone https://github.

com/huggingface/pytorch-transformers.

git   GPT-2 Now, you just need a single command to start the model!.View the code on Gist.

Let’s see what output our GPT-2 model gives for the input text: The unicorns had seemed to know each other almost as well as they did common humans.

The study was published in Science Translational Medicine on May 6.

Whats more, researchers found that five percent of the unicorns recognized each other well.

The study team thinks this might translate into a future where humans would be able to communicate more clearly with those known as super Unicorns.

And if were going to move ahead with that future, weve got to do it at least a Isn’t that crazy?.The text that the model generated is very cohesive and actually can be mistaken as a real news article.

  XLNet XLNet integrates ideas from Transformer-XL, the state-of-the-art autoregressive model, into pretraining.

Empirically, XLNet outperforms BERT on 20 tasks, often by a large margin.

XLNet achieves state-of-the-art results on 18 tasks including question answering, natural language inference, sentiment analysis, and document ranking.

You can use the following code for the same: View the code on Gist.

This is the output that XLNet gives: St.

Nicholas was located in the valley in Chile.

And, they were familiar with the southern part of Spain.

Since 1988, people had lived in the valley, for many years.

Even without a natural shelter, people were getting a temporary shelter.

Some of the unicorns were acquainted with the Spanish language, but the rest were completely unfamiliar with English.

But, they were also finding relief in the valley.

<eop> Bioinfo < The Bioinfo website has an open, live community about the Interesting.

While the GPT-2 model focussed directly on the scientific angle of the news about unicorns, XLNet actually nicely built up the context and subtly introduced the topic of unicorns.

Let’s see how does Transformer-XL performs!.  Transformer-XL Transformer networks are limited by a fixed-length context and thus can be improved through learning longer-term dependency.

That’s why Google proposed a novel method called Transformer-XL (meaning extra long) for language modeling, which enables a Transformer architecture to learn longer-term dependency.

Transformer-XL is up to 1800 times faster than a typical Transformer.

You can use the below code to run Transformer-XL: View the code on Gist.

Here’s the text generated: both never spoke in their native language ( a natural language ).

If they are speaking in their native language they will have no communication with the original speakers.

The encounter with a dingo brought between two and four unicorns to a head at once, thus crossing the border into Peru to avoid internecine warfare, as they did with the Aztecs.

On September 11, 1930, three armed robbers killed a donkey for helping their fellow soldiers fight alongside a group of Argentines.

During the same year Now, this is awesome.

It is interesting to see how different models focus on different aspects of the input text to generate further.

This variation is due to a lot of factors but mostly can be attributed to different training data and model architectures.

But there’s a caveat.

Neural text generation has been facing a bit of backlash in recent times as people worry it can increase problems related to fake news.

But think about the positive side of it!.We can use it for many positive applications like- helping writers/creatives with new ideas, and so on.

  Training a Masked Language Model for BERT The BERT framework, a new language representation model from Google AI, uses pre-training and fine-tuning to create state-of-the-art NLP models for a wide range of tasks.

These tasks include question answering systems, sentiment analysis, and language inference.

BERT is pre-trained using the following two unsupervised prediction tasks: Masked Language Modeling (MLM) Next Sentence Prediction And you can implement both of these using PyTorch-Transformers.

In fact, you can build your own BERT model from scratch or fine-tune a pre-trained version.

So, let’s see how can we implement the Masked Language Model for BERT.

  Problem Definition Let’s formally define our problem statement: Given an input sequence, we will randomly mask some words.

The model then should predict the original value of the masked words, based on the context provided by the other, non-masked, words in the sequence.

So why are we doing this?.The model learns the rules of the language during the training process.

And we’ll soon see how effective this process is.

First, let’s prepare a tokenized input from a text string using BertTokenizer: View the code on Gist.

This is how our text looks like after tokenization: The next step would be to convert this into a sequence of integers and create PyTorch tensors of them so that we can use them directly for computation: View the code on Gist.

Notice that we have set [MASK] at the 8th index in the sentence which is the word ‘Hensen’.

This is what our model will try to predict.

Now that our data is rightly pre-processed for BERT, we will create a Masked Language Model.

Let’s now use BertForMaskedLM to predict a masked token: View the code on Gist.

Let’s see what is the output of our model: Predicted token is: henson That’s quite impressive.

This was a small demo of training a Masked Language Model on a single input sequence.

Nevertheless, it is a very important part of the training process for many Transformer-based architectures.

This is because it allows bidirectional training in models – which was previously impossible.

Congratulations!.You’ve just implemented your first Masked Language Model!. More details

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