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Day 12 Masked Language Models

The document discusses Masked Language Modeling (MLM), a crucial pretraining technique in NLP that involves predicting masked words in a text based on their context. It highlights the benefits of MLM, including improved contextual understanding, self-supervised learning, and enhanced performance in various NLP tasks. Popular models utilizing MLM, such as BERT and RoBERTa, are also mentioned, emphasizing their effectiveness in learning from large amounts of unlabeled data.

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0% found this document useful (0 votes)

8 views7 pages

Day 12 Masked Language Models

Uploaded by

aman

We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.

Available Formats

Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd

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Mastering LLMs

Day 12: Masked Language Modeling

Powerful

Transformer

Machine Learning is a [MASK] technology

If you've already explored models like BERT, T5, and
GPT, you might wonder why learning about Masked
Language Modeling is still crucial.

Even though you've covered these popular models,

mastering Masked Language Modeling helps you:

Deepen your understanding of how models like

BERT learn contextual representations.

Compare different language modeling objectives

and leverage them effectively.

Improve your fine-tuning skills for various

downstream NLP tasks.

Enhance interpretability and debugging when

dealing with masked predictions.

Stay ahead in the evolving NLP landscape with

advanced pretraining techniques.
Masked Language Modeling

Masked Language Modeling is a widely used

pretraining technique in NLP, where parts of the
input text are randomly masked, and the model is
trained to predict the missing words based on their
surrounding context.

This technique allows models to learn rich

contextual representations, capturing deep
semantic relationships between words.
How does it work?

During the training process, Masked Language

Modeling follows these key steps:

Tokenization: The input text is split into smaller

units (tokens).

Masking: A portion of the tokens (typically 15%)

are replaced with a special [MASK] token.

Contextual Prediction: The model predicts the

masked tokens using surrounding words.

Loss Optimization: The predicted output is

compared with the actual tokens, and the model
is updated accordingly.

Example:

Input: "Machine learning is a [MASK]

technology."
Expected Output: "powerful"
Key Characteristics

✅ Bidirectional Context Understanding

Masked Language Modeling consider both the left
and right context of a word, unlike autoregressive
models (e.g., GPT) that process text sequentially.

✅ Self-Supervised Learning
Masked Language Modeling can learn from large
amounts of unlabeled data, making them highly
efficient for transfer learning.

✅ Improved Generalization
After pretraining, Masked Language Modeling can
be fine-tuned for various NLP tasks like
classification, sentiment analysis, and named entity
recognition (NER).
Popular Models

Some of the top models leveraging Masked

Language Modeling include:

BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations

from Transformers)
RoBERTa (Robustly optimized BERT approach)
ALBERT (A Lite BERT for faster performance)
DistilBERT (A lightweight, distilled version of
BERT)

Advantages