BERT: State of the Art NLP Model, Explained

BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) is a recent paper published by researchers at Google AI Language. It has caused a stir in the Machine Learning community by presenting state-of-the-art results in a wide variety of NLP tasks, including Question Answering (SQuAD v1.1), Natural Language Inference (MNLI), and others. BERT's key technical innovation is applying the bidirectional training of Transformer, a popular attention model, to language modelling. This is in contrast to previous efforts which looked at a text sequence either from left to right or combined left-to-right and right-to-left training. The paper's results show that a language model which is bidirectionally trained can have a deeper sense of language context and flow than single-direction language models.