Transformers are a type of neural network architecture that have revolutionized the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP). Introduced in the paper "Attention is All You Need" by Vaswani et al. in 2017, Transformers utilize a mechanism called self-attention to process language data more efficiently than previous models like RNNs and LSTMs. This architecture allows for the parallelization of training, which significantly speeds up the learning process.
The key components of Transformers include multi-head attention, which enables the model to focus on different parts of the input sequence simultaneously, and positional encoding, which helps the model understand the order of words. Transformers are the foundation for many state-of-the-art NLP models, such as BERT, GPT, and T5, and are widely used for tasks like text generation, translation, and sentiment analysis. Overall, the introduction of Transformers has significantly advanced the capabilities and performance of NLP applications.
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