The evolution of transformer models from unidirectional to bidirectional in Natural Language Processing

Research Article
Open access

The evolution of transformer models from unidirectional to bidirectional in Natural Language Processing

Yihang Sun 1*
  • 1 Lehigh University    
  • *corresponding author yis722@lehigh.edu
Published on 23 February 2024 | https://doi.org/10.54254/2755-2721/42/20230794
ACE Vol.42
ISSN (Print): 2755-273X
ISSN (Online): 2755-2721
ISBN (Print): 978-1-83558-309-8
ISBN (Online): 978-1-83558-310-4

Abstract

Transformer models have revolutionized Natural Language Processing (NLP), transitioning from traditional sequential models to innovative architectures based on attention mechanisms. The shift from unidirectional to bidirectional models has been a remarkable development in NLP. This paper mainly focuses on the evolution of NLP caused by Transformer models, with the transition from unidirectional to bidirectional modeling. This paper explores how the transformer model has revolutionized NLP, and the evolution from traditional sequential models to innovative attention-driven architectures. In this paper, it mainly discusses the limitations of traditional NLP models like RNNs, LSTMs and CNN when handling lengthy text sequences and complex dependencies, highlighting how transformer models, employing self-attention mechanisms and bidirectional modeling (e.g., BERT and GPT), have significantly improved NLP tasks. It provides a thorough review of the shift from unidirectional to bidirectional transformer models, offering insights into their utilization and development. Finally, this paper concludes with a summary and outlook for the entire study.

Keywords:

Unidirectional Model, Bidirectional Model, Natural Language Processing

Sun,Y. (2024). The evolution of transformer models from unidirectional to bidirectional in Natural Language Processing. Applied and Computational Engineering,42,281-289.
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References

[1]. Vaswani, Ashish, et al. “Attention is all you need”. Advances in neural information processing systems 30 (2017).

[2]. Subakti, A., Murfi, H. & Hariadi, N. “The performance of BERT as data representation of text clustering”. Journal of Big Data 9, 15 (2022).

[3]. Lin, Tianyang, et al. "A Survey of Transformers." Artificial Intelligence Open, 34 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.aiopen.2022.10.001.

[4]. Dai, Zihang, et al. "Transformer-xl: Attentive language models beyond a fixed-length context." arXiv preprint arXiv:1901.02860 (2019).

[5]. Yang, Zhilin, et al. "Xlnet: Generalized autoregressive pretraining for language understanding." Advances in neural information processing systems 32 (2019).

[6]. Lan, Zhenzhong, et al. "Albert: A lite bert for self-supervised learning of language representations." arXiv preprint arXiv:1909.11942 (2020).

[7]. Salehinejad, H., Sankar, S., Barfett, J., Colak, E., & Valaee, S. Recent Advances in Recurrent Neural Networks. arXiv preprint arXiv:1801.01078 (2017).

[8]. Bengio, Y., Simard, P., & Frasconi, P. Learning long-term dependencies with gradient descent is difficult. IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks, 5(2), 157–166 (1994).

[9]. Wadawadagi, Ramesh, and Veerappa Pagi. "Sentiment analysis with deep neural networks: comparative study and performance assessment." Artificial Intelligence Review 53.8: 6155-6195 (2020).

[10]. Simonyan, Karen, and Andrew Zisserman. "Very deep convolutional networks for large-scale image recognition." arXiv preprint arXiv:1409.1556 (2014).

[11]. Schneider, Phillip, et al. "A decade of knowledge graphs in natural language processing: A survey." arXiv preprint arXiv:2210.00105 (2022).

[12]. Wu, Ning, et al. "Large language models are diverse role-players for summarization evaluation." arXiv preprint arXiv:2303.15078 (2023).

[13]. Davison Joe. 2020a. “New Pipeline for Zero-Shot Text Classification.” Retrieved December 28, (2021).


Cite this article

Sun,Y. (2024). The evolution of transformer models from unidirectional to bidirectional in Natural Language Processing. Applied and Computational Engineering,42,281-289.

Data availability

The datasets used and/or analyzed during the current study will be available from the authors upon reasonable request.

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About volume

Volume title: Proceedings of the 2023 International Conference on Machine Learning and Automation

ISBN:978-1-83558-309-8(Print) / 978-1-83558-310-4(Online)
Editor:Mustafa İSTANBULLU
Conference website: https://2023.confmla.org/
Conference date: 18 October 2023
Series: Applied and Computational Engineering
Volume number: Vol.42
ISSN:2755-2721(Print) / 2755-273X(Online)

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References

[1]. Vaswani, Ashish, et al. “Attention is all you need”. Advances in neural information processing systems 30 (2017).

[2]. Subakti, A., Murfi, H. & Hariadi, N. “The performance of BERT as data representation of text clustering”. Journal of Big Data 9, 15 (2022).

[3]. Lin, Tianyang, et al. "A Survey of Transformers." Artificial Intelligence Open, 34 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.aiopen.2022.10.001.

[4]. Dai, Zihang, et al. "Transformer-xl: Attentive language models beyond a fixed-length context." arXiv preprint arXiv:1901.02860 (2019).

[5]. Yang, Zhilin, et al. "Xlnet: Generalized autoregressive pretraining for language understanding." Advances in neural information processing systems 32 (2019).

[6]. Lan, Zhenzhong, et al. "Albert: A lite bert for self-supervised learning of language representations." arXiv preprint arXiv:1909.11942 (2020).

[7]. Salehinejad, H., Sankar, S., Barfett, J., Colak, E., & Valaee, S. Recent Advances in Recurrent Neural Networks. arXiv preprint arXiv:1801.01078 (2017).

[8]. Bengio, Y., Simard, P., & Frasconi, P. Learning long-term dependencies with gradient descent is difficult. IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks, 5(2), 157–166 (1994).

[9]. Wadawadagi, Ramesh, and Veerappa Pagi. "Sentiment analysis with deep neural networks: comparative study and performance assessment." Artificial Intelligence Review 53.8: 6155-6195 (2020).

[10]. Simonyan, Karen, and Andrew Zisserman. "Very deep convolutional networks for large-scale image recognition." arXiv preprint arXiv:1409.1556 (2014).

[11]. Schneider, Phillip, et al. "A decade of knowledge graphs in natural language processing: A survey." arXiv preprint arXiv:2210.00105 (2022).

[12]. Wu, Ning, et al. "Large language models are diverse role-players for summarization evaluation." arXiv preprint arXiv:2303.15078 (2023).

[13]. Davison Joe. 2020a. “New Pipeline for Zero-Shot Text Classification.” Retrieved December 28, (2021).