BERT and fine tunning

Hey, I this is my first blog post ever =)

In this post i will show something that i did for a NLP course that Im currently enrolled, I focused on fine-tuning the BERTimabu model, a Portuguese version of the BERT model, for two specific tasks: vowel density regression and sentence classification. BERT, a revolutionary model in natural language processing, uses a bidirectional transformer architecture, significantly enhancing the context understanding of words in sentences. This architecture, based on the Transformer model and its encoder component, marks a departure from previous sequential learning methods by employing attention mechanisms exclusively. Here is a image of the architecture

My study delves into the application of BERT in two areas. First, I investigated the regression of vowel density in texts. This involved calculating the proportion of vowels (ignoring spaces, punctuation, and non-letter characters) and exploring how well the BERT model could predict this density. The task posed challenges, as traditional models often struggled with such context-specific predictions.

I also explored sentence classification based on vowel density, dividing sentences into three classes according to their vowel density. This classification was examined in both balanced and unbalanced datasets, with the performance assessed across various metrics. The results highlighted the impact of class imbalance on model performance, especially in the unbalanced dataset.

Throughout this work, I demonstrated the adaptability and effectiveness of the BERT model in handling these distinct linguistic tasks. The experiments underscored the importance of context in language models and the potential of BERT in enhancing the understanding and processing of Portuguese language tasks. The findings provide valuable insights into the models capabilities and limitations, paving the way for further refinements and applications in natural language processing.

For more details here is the colab where I implemented the models Link to code