Question: Why transformer architecture was introduced?
Evidence: Language modeling is a probabilistic description of language phenomenon. It provides essential context to distinguish words which sound similar and therefore has one of the most useful applications in Natural Language Processing (NLP) especially in downstreaming tasks like Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR). Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN) especially Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) networks BIBREF0 have been the typical solution to language modeling which do achieve strong results. In spite of these results, their fundamental sequential computation constraint has restricted their use in the modeling of long-term dependencies in sequential data. To address these issues Transformer architecture was introduced. Transformers relies completely on an attention mechanism to form global dependencies between input and output. It also offers more parallelization and has achieved SOTA results in language modeling outperforming LSTM models BIBREF1.
In recent years,we have seen a lot of development based on this standard transformer models particularly on unsupervised pre-training(BIBREF2, BIBREF3, BIBREF4, BIBREF5, BIBREF6, BIBREF7 which have set state-of-the art results on multiple NLP benchmarks. One such model architecture has been the Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) model which uses a deep bidirectional transformer architecture.
Another architecture of interest would be the Transformer-XL, which introduces the notion of recurrence in a self-attention model.
The primary research focus though has been mostly on English language for which abundant data is present. It is interesting to see the performance of these models for an agglutinative language like Finnish, which is morphologically richer than English.
In this project, we explore the implementation of Transformer-based models (BERT and Transformer-XL) in language modeling for Finnish. We will use the same training data as in BIBREF8 so that we can do fair comparisons with the performance of the LSTM models. Also, as the BERT model is a bi-directional transformer, we will have to approximate the conditional probabilities given a sequence of words. We also experiment with using sub-word units with Transformer-XL to cope with the large vocabulary problems associated with the Finnish Language. With smaller units, the modeled sequences are longer, and we hope that the recursive XL architecture can allow us to still model long term effects. To the best of our knowledge this is the first work with the Finnish language to use the following:
Approximation of perplexity using a BERT architecture
Using Transformer-XL architecture with sub-word units.
Comparison of Transformer and LSTM models as language models in the same comparable settings with an agglutinative language.
Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN) especially Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) networks [1] have been the typical solution to language modeling which do achieve strong results. In spite of these results, their fundamental sequential computation constraint has restricted their use in the modeling of long-term dependencies in sequential data. To address these issues Transformer architecture was introduced.
Answer: To address these issues of RNN especially LSTM networks that their fundamental sequential computation constraint has restricted their use in the modeling of long-term dependencies in sequential data.