How do transformers improve upon traditional neural networks for NLP tasks?
Asked on Oct 18, 2025
Answer
Transformers represent a significant advancement over traditional neural networks for NLP tasks by enabling efficient handling of long-range dependencies and parallel processing of data. They use self-attention mechanisms to weigh the importance of different words in a sentence, which improves context understanding and model performance.
Example Concept: Transformers use a self-attention mechanism that allows the model to consider the relationships between all words in a sentence simultaneously. This contrasts with traditional RNNs that process words sequentially, which can lead to difficulties in capturing long-range dependencies. The transformer architecture also supports parallelization, making it more efficient for training on large datasets.
Additional Comment:
- Transformers eliminate the need for recurrence, allowing for faster training times.
- They use positional encoding to retain the order of words, which is crucial for understanding context.
- The self-attention mechanism helps in capturing global dependencies within the input data.
- Transformers have become the foundation for many state-of-the-art NLP models, such as BERT and GPT.
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