Request A Quote

Get In Touch

Please fill out the form below if you have a plan or project in mind that you'd like to share with us.

Follow Us On:

What is BERT?

girl
489
blog images

BERT, short for Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformersis a machine learning (ML) framework for natural language processing. In 2018, Google developed this algorithm to improve contextual understanding of untagged text for many different tasks by learning to predict text that can come before and after (bidirectionally) other text.

 

BERT examples

BERT is used e.g. a wide range of language tasks. Below are examples of where the framework can help.

 

·        Determine if movie reviews are positive or negative

·        Help chatbots answer questions

·        Help predict text when writing an email

·        Can quickly summarize long legal contracts.

·        Distinguishes ambiguous text words. surrounding context based on text


Why is BERT important?

BERT converts words into numbers. This process is important because machine learning models use numbers, not words, as inputs. It allows you to train machine learning models on your text data. In other words, BERT models are used to transform your text data so that it can be used with other types of data to make ML model predictions.

 

BERTS Frequently Asked Questions

Can BERT be used for topic modelling ?

Yes. BERT Topic is a topic modeling technique that uses BERT embeddings and class-based TF-IDF to create dense clusters, enabling easy-to-interpret topics and preserving important words in topic descriptions.

 

What is Google BERT used for?

This is important. Note. that BERT is an algorithm that can be used in many other applications besides Google. When we talk about Google BERT, we mean its application in the search engine system. With Google, BERT is used to understand user search intent and content indexed by the search engine.

 

Is BERT a neural network?

Yes. BERT is a neural network-based technique for pre-training language processing. It can be used to extract the context of words in search queries.

 

Is BERT supervised or unsupervised?

BERT is a deep two-way unsupervised linguistic representation pre-trained only on a corpus of text.

H2O.ai and BERT: The pre-trained models by BERT provides natural language processing (NLP) cutting-edge results. Unlike directional models, which read text sequentially, BERT models look at surrounding words to understand context. The models are pre-trained to use large amounts of text to learn relationships, giving them an advantage over other techniques. Thanks to H2O Driverless AI GPU acceleration, using high-tech technologies has never been faster or easier


Differences between GPT-3 and BERT

There are quite a few differences between BERT and GPT-3, and the most obvious are:


Main goal

ChatGPT-3 generates text based on the context and is designed for conversational AI and chatbot applications. In contrast, BERT is primarily designed for tasks that require understanding of the meaning and context of words. So, it is used for such NLP tasks as sentiment analysis and question answering.


Architecture

Both language models use a transformer architecture that consists of multiple layers. GPT-3 has an autoregressive transformer decoder. It means the model generates text sequentially from left to right and in one direction, predicting the next word based on the previous one.


BERT, on the contrary, has a transformer encoder and is designed for bidirectional context representation. It means that it processes text both left-to-right and right-to-left, thus capturing context in both directions.


Model size

GPT-3 is made up of 175 billion parameters, while BERT has 340 million parameters. It means GPT-3 is significantly larger than its competitor due to its much more extensive training dataset size.


Fine-tuning 

GPT-3 is typically fine-tuned on specific tasks during training with task-specific examples. It can be fine-tuned for various tasks by using small datasets.

BERT is pre-trained on a large dataset and then fine-tuned on specific tasks. It requires training datasets tailored to particular tasks for effective performance.


GPT-3 vs. BERT: capabilities comparison

To answer the question which model is better, BERT vs. GPT-3, we’ve compiled all the main information in a brief comparison table. 



GPT-3

BERT

Model

Autoregressive

Discriminative

Objective

Generates human-like text

Recognizes sentiment

Architecture

Unidirectional: it processes text in one direction using a decoder

Bidirectional: it processes text in both directions

using an encoder 

Size

175 billion parameters

340 million parameters

Training data

It is trained on language modeling by using hundreds of billions of words

It is trained on masked language modeling and next

 sentence prediction by using 3.3 billion words

Pre-training

Unsupervised pre-training on a large data

Unsupervised pre-training on a large corpus of text

Fine-turning

Does not require but can be fine-tuned for specific tasks

Requires fine-tuning for specific tasks

Uses cases

Coding
ML code generation
Chatbots and virtual assistants
Creative storytelling
Language translation

Sentiment analysis
Text classification
Question answering
Machine translation

Accuracy

Based on the Super GLUE benchmark, 86.9%

Based on the GLUE benchmark, 80.5%


Final thoughts

BERT and GPT-3 language models are tangible examples of what AI is capable of and we have already benefited from them in real life. However, as these models evolve and become more intelligent, it is critical to keep in mind their limitations and pitfalls, which are and will be present. Hence, people can delegate some of their responsibilities to AI and use language models as business assistants, but these models will highly unlikely replace humans completely.

Thus, the competition of BERT vs. GPT-3 is not based on one model being better than the other. Rather, it is about understanding each model’s unique characteristics and choosing the right tool for you own needs.