BERT

07/08/2025 17 min

Episode Synopsis

Review of the 2017 paper "BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding", leveraging the transformer architecture, by Google.This paper introduces BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers), a novel language representation model designed for pre-training deep bidirectional representations from unlabeled text. Unlike prior models that process text unidirectionally, BERT conditions on both left and right context in all layers, enabling it to achieve state-of-the-art results across eleven natural language processing (NLP) tasks, including question answering and language inference. The model utilizes two primary pre-training tasks: Masked LM for bidirectional learning and Next Sentence Prediction to understand sentence relationships. The authors demonstrate that this bidirectional approach, coupled with fine-tuning the pre-trained model for specific tasks, significantly outperforms previous methods, even with minimal task-specific architectural modifications.

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