Revised on 3/20/20 - Switched to tokenizer.encode_plus and added validation loss. See Revision History at the end for details.
In this tutorial I’ll show you how to use BERT with the huggingface PyTorch library to quickly and efficiently fine-tune a model to get near state of the art performance in sentence classification. More broadly, I describe the practical application of transfer learning in NLP to create high performance models with minimal effort on a range of NLP tasks.
This post is presented in two forms–as a blog post here and as a Colab Notebook here.
The content is identical in both, but:
I’ve also published a video walkthrough of this post on my YouTube channel!
2018 was a breakthrough year in NLP. Transfer learning, particularly models like Allen AI’s ELMO, OpenAI’s Open-GPT, and Google’s BERT allowed researchers to smash multiple benchmarks with minimal task-specific fine-tuning and provided the rest of the NLP community with pretrained models that could easily (with less data and less compute time) be fine-tuned and implemented to produce state of the art results. Unfortunately, for many starting out in NLP and even for some experienced practicioners, the theory and practical application of these powerful models is still not well understood.
BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers), released in late 2018, is the model we will use in this tutorial to provide readers with a better understanding of and practical guidance for using transfer learning models in NLP. BERT is a method of pretraining language representations that was used to create models that NLP practicioners can then download and use for free. You can either use these models to extract high quality language features from your text data, or you can fine-tune these models on a specific task (classification, entity recognition, question answering, etc.) with your own data to produce state of the art predictions.
This post will explain how you can modify and fine-tune BERT to create a powerful NLP model that quickly gives you state of the art results.
In this tutorial, we will use BERT to train a text classifier. Specifically, we will take the pre-trained BERT model, add an untrained layer of neurons on the end, and train the new model for our classification task. Why do this rather than train a train a specific deep learning model (a CNN, BiLSTM, etc.) that is well suited for the specific NLP task you need?
**Quicker Development**
- First, the pre-trained BERT model weights already encode a lot of information about our language. As a result, it takes much less time to train our fine-tuned model - it is as if we have already trained the bottom layers of our network extensively and only need to gently tune them while using their output as features for our classification task. In fact, the authors recommend only 2-4 epochs of training for fine-tuning BERT on a specific NLP task (compared to the hundreds of GPU hours needed to train the original BERT model or a LSTM from scratch!).
**Less Data**
- In addition and perhaps just as important, because of the pre-trained weights this method allows us to fine-tune our task on a much smaller dataset than would be required in a model that is built from scratch. A major drawback of NLP models built from scratch is that we often need a prohibitively large dataset in order to train our network to reasonable accuracy, meaning a lot of time and energy had to be put into dataset creation. By fine-tuning BERT, we are now able to get away with training a model to good performance on a much smaller amount of training data.
**Better Results**
- Finally, this simple fine-tuning procedure (typically adding one fully-connected layer on top of BERT and training for a few epochs) was shown to achieve state of the art results with minimal task-specific adjustments for a wide variety of tasks: classification, language inference, semantic similarity, question answering, etc. Rather than implementing custom and sometimes-obscure architetures shown to work well on a specific task, simply fine-tuning BERT is shown to be a better (or at least equal) alternative.
This shift to transfer learning parallels the same shift that took place in computer vision a few years ago. Creating a good deep learning network for computer vision tasks can take millions of parameters and be very expensive to train. Researchers discovered that deep networks learn hierarchical feature representations (simple features like edges at the lowest layers with gradually more complex features at higher layers). Rather than training a new network from scratch each time, the lower layers of a trained network with generalized image features could be copied and transfered for use in another network with a different task. It soon became common practice to download a pre-trained deep network and quickly retrain it for the new task or add additional layers on top - vastly preferable to the expensive process of training a network from scratch. For many, the introduction of deep pre-trained language models in 2018 (ELMO, BERT, ULMFIT, Open-GPT, etc.) signals the same shift to transfer learning in NLP that computer vision saw.