Model Overview

BERT is a method of pre-training language representations which obtains state-of-the-art results on a wide array of NLP tasks.

Model Architecture

BERT's model architecture is a multi-layer bidirectional Transformer encoder. Based on the model size, we have the following two default configurations of BERT:

BERT training consists of two steps, pre-training the language model in an unsupervised fashion on vast amounts of unannotated datasets, and then using this pre-trained model for fine-tuning for various NLP tasks, such as question and answer, sentence classification, or sentiment analysis. Fine-tuning typically adds an extra layer or two for the specific task and further trains the model using a task-specific annotated dataset, starting from the pre-trained backbone weights. The end-to-end process in depicted in the following image:

Figure 1: BERT Pipeline

Training

This model was trained using script available on NGC and in GitHub repo.

Dataset

The following datasets were used to train this model:

• SQuAD 1.1 + 2.0 - Reading comprehension dataset, consisting of questions posed by crowdworkers on a set of Wikipedia articles, where the answer to every question is a segment of text, or span, from the corresponding reading passage, or the question might be unanswerable.

Performance

Performance numbers for this model are available in NGC.

References

• Original paper
• NVIDIA model implementation in NGC
• NVIDIA model implementation on GitHub

License

This model was trained using open-source software available in Deep Learning Examples repository. For terms of use, please refer to the license of the script and the datasets the model was derived from.