Building KantaiBERT from scratch

We will build KantaiBERT in 15 steps from scratch and run it on an MLM example.

Open Google Colaboratory (you need a Gmail account). Then upload KantaiBERT.ipynb, which is on GitHub in this chapter’s directory.

The titles of the 15 steps of this section are similar to the titles of the notebook cells, which makes them easy to follow.

Let’s start by loading the dataset.

Step 1: Loading the dataset

Ready-to-use datasets provide an objective way to train and compare transformers. In Chapter 5, Downstream NLP Tasks with Transformers, we will explore several datasets. However, this chapter aims to understand the training process of a transformer with notebook cells that can be run in real time without waiting for hours to obtain a result.

I chose to use the works of Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), the German philosopher who was the epitome of the Age of Enlightenment. The idea is to introduce human-like logic and pretrained...