NLP with BERT: Sentiment Analysis Using SAS(r) Deep Learning and DLPy
A revolution is taking place in natural language processing (NLP) as a result of two ideas. The first idea is that pretraining a deep neural network as a language model is a good starting point for a range of NLP tasks. These networks can be augmented (layers can be added or dropped) and then fine tuned with transfer learning for specific NLP tasks. The second idea involves a paradigm shift away from traditional recurrent neural networks (RNNs) and toward deep neural networks based on Transformer building blocks. One architecture that embodies these ideas is Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) BERT and its variants have been at or near the top of the leaderboard for many traditional NLP tasks, such as the general language understanding evaluation (GLUE) benchmarks. This paper provides an overview of BERT and shows how you can create your own BERT model by using SAS Deep Learning and the SAS DLPy Python package. It illustrates the effectiveness of BERT by performing sentiment analysis on unstructured product reviews submitted to Amazon.