Papers › Exploring Transformers in Natural Language Generation: GPT, BERT, and XLNet

Exploring Transformers in Natural Language Generation: GPT, BERT, and XLNet

16 Feb 2021arXiv:2102.08036archive 2025-07-28

M. Onat Topal, Anil Bas, Imke van Heerden

Recent years have seen a proliferation of attention mechanisms and the rise of Transformers in Natural Language Generation (NLG). Previously, state-of-the-art NLG architectures such as RNN and LSTM ran into vanishing gradient problems; as sentences grew larger, distance between positions remained linear, and sequential computation hindered parallelization since sentences were processed word by word. Transformers usher in a new era. In this paper, we explore three major Transformer-based models, namely GPT, BERT, and XLNet, that carry significant implications for the field. NLG is a burgeoning area that is now bolstered with rapid developments in attention mechanisms. From poetry generation to summarization, text generation derives benefit as Transformer-based language models achieve groundbreaking results.

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Text Generation

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Methods

AdamAttentionAttention DropoutBERTBPECosine AnnealingDense ConnectionsDiscriminative Fine-TuningDropoutGPTLSTMLayer NormalizationLinear LayerLinear Warmup With Cosine AnnealingLinear Warmup With Linear DecayMulti-Head AttentionResidual ConnectionSentencePieceSigmoid ActivationSoftmaxTanh ActivationWeight DecayWordPieceXLNet

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