Unlocking Transfer Learning's Potential in Natural Language Processing: An Extensive Investigation and Evaluation
Pradipta Banerjee, Swati Kashyap · 2024
With the advent of transfer learning approaches, Natural Language Processing (NLP) problems have experienced tremendous progress, as demonstrated by models such as Generative Pre-trained Transformers (GPT) and Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT). The usefulness of such transfer learning strategies across a range of NLP tasks and domains is investigated in this work. The study uses a methodical methodology to assess BERT and GPT's performance on a wide range of tasks. In addition, the study evaluates the generalizability and flexibility of these models across a broad variety of disciplines, including social media, finance, legal, and biological literature. The study's methodology entails rigorous assessment utilizing task-specific standard metrics after pre-trained BERT and GPT models have been fine-tuned using task-specific datasets. To determine the relative benefits and drawbacks of transfer learning strategies in various contexts, comparative studies are carried out against baseline models and other cutting-edge methodologies. Additionally, the study looks at how the performance of BERT and GPT is affected by variables including task difficulty, dataset size, and domain specificity. The results provide a comprehensive understanding of the benefits and drawbacks of transfer learning strategies in a variety of NLP tasks and domains. While BERT performs admirably on tests requiring semantic comprehension and contextual knowledge, GPT is superior at producing text that is both cohesive and appropriate to the situation. Both models, however, show sensitivity to dataset features and idiosyncrasies unique to the domain, indicating the necessity for customized fine-tuning techniques for best results. All things considered, this study advances our knowledge of the usefulness and efficiency of transfer learning strategies and provides insightful information for academics and practitioners who want to use BERT, GPT, and related models in a variety of NLP tasks and fields.