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Bert: Pre-Training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding (arxiv.org)
3 points by musha68k on Apr 19, 2023 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: It learns from unlabeled text by reading each word with the words before and after it, then needs one added layer to adapt to a task. It beat the previous best on eleven language tasks, scoring 80.5% on a broad test, 7.7 points higher.

Abstract · BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding

We introduce a new language representation model called BERT, which stands for Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers. Unlike recent language representation models, BERT is designed to pre-train deep bidirectional representations from unlabeled text by jointly conditioning on both left and right context in all layers. As a result, the pre-trained BERT model can be fine-tuned with just one additional output layer to create state-of-the-art models for a wide range of tasks, such as question answering and language inference, without substantial task-specific architecture modifications. BERT is conceptually simple and empirically powerful. It obtains new state-of-the-art results on eleven natural language processing tasks, including pushing the GLUE score to 80.5% (7.7% point absolute improvement), MultiNLI accuracy to 86.7% (4.6% absolute improvement), SQuAD v1.1 question answering Test F1 to 93.2 (1.5 point absolute improvement) and SQuAD v2.0 Test F1 to 83.1 (5.1 point absolute improvement).

Jacob Devlin, Ming-Wei Chang, Kenton Lee, Kristina Toutanova
arXiv:1810.04805 · cs.CL · submitted Oct 11, 2018 · updated May 24, 2019
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Also discussed: Oct 2018 (78 points, 5 comments)