Skip to content

🤖 05 — Transformers Overview

Transformers are modern deep learning architectures for language tasks.

They power systems like:

  • BERT
  • GPT-style models
  • translation systems
  • summarizers
  • semantic search

Core Ideas

Concept Meaning
Token piece of text
Embedding numeric representation
Attention mechanism for focusing on relevant tokens
Pretraining learning from huge text corpora
Fine-tuning adapting to a specific task

When to Use Classic NLP vs Transformers

Situation Good Choice
small dataset, simple classifier TF-IDF + Logistic Regression
high accuracy text task pretrained transformer
limited compute classic NLP baseline
semantic understanding transformer embeddings

Landmark Paper


Next

➡️ 06-exercises