The Illustrated BERT, ELMo, and co. (How NLP Cracked Transfer Learning)

The year 2018 has been an inflection point for machine learning models handling text (or more accurately, Natural Language Processing or NLP for short). Our conceptual understanding of how best to represent words and sentences in a way that best captures underlying meanings and relationships is rapidly evolving. Moreover, the NLP community has been putting forward incredibly powerful components that you can freely download and use in your own models and pipelines (It's been referred to as NLP's ImageNet moment, referencing how years ago similar developments accelerated the development of machine learning in Computer Vision tasks). But I couldn't think of anything else..) One of the latest milestones in this development is the release of BERT, an event described as marking the beginning of a new era in NLP. BERT is a model that broke several records for how well models can handle language-based tasks.