NLP Base Camp
Hey, I’m Chris McCormick. I help researchers, students, and developers like you to master the most challenging subjects in NLP, and to jump start your projects with easy-to-read eBooks, video tutorials, and example code.
A "base camp" provides equipment and supplies for people before setting off on their adventures...
In the same way, NLP Base Camp will help you understand the fundamental concepts you need and supply easy-to-follow example code that together can provide a smooth start for your next NLP project.
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All Access Membership
A monthly base camp membership grants you access to ALL of my existing content, plus new tutorials I continue to publish. This includes:
Videos
Video Lectures & Code Walkthroughs with colorful illustrations to help guide you through new concepts.
eBooks
eBooks offer deep-dives into the details of the architectures of word2vec, BERT, and multiple BERT variants.
Example Code
Tutorials and example code for a wide variety of common BERT use-cases will help jump start your own project.
Video Courses: BERT & GPT Fundamentals
The Inner Workings of BERT
This course will introduce you to BERT and teach you all about the internals of its architecture.
Basics of Fine-Tuning BERT
Begin applying BERT to real applications with this video course and Colab Notebook. We'll use Python and the "transformers" library from huggingface.
NEW - The Inner Workings of GPT
Learn the details of the architecture that's behind OpenAI's models (GPT-3 and ChatGPT)!
Launch your BERT Project
The Library includes over 15 examples--all are written in Python, built on PyTorch and the hugginface/transformers library, and run on a free GPU in Google Colab!
Document Classification
Text Classification
Learn the basics of classifying longer pieces of text with BERT.
Multiclass
Text classification, but now on a dataset where document length is more crucial, and where GPU memory becomes a limiting factor.
Multi-Label
Learn how to customize BERT's classification layer to different tasks--in this case, classifying text where each sample can have multiple labels.
Domain-Specific Text
BERT Variants
Learn how to find and apply publicly-available variants of BERT tailored to specific domains such as medical text.
Adding Vocab
Add terms to BERT's vocabulary, and improve BERT's accuracy by continuing to Pre-Train BERT on unlabeled text from your domain.
Beyond English
Learn how Multilingual BERT models help you apply BERT to other languages beyond English--even languages with limited training text! details
Question Answering
Question Answering Basics
Learn the details of how BERT is applied to search reference text for the answer to a given question. Try with your own examples!
Fine-Tuning on SQuAD
Training BERT on the SQuAD question answering dataset is tricky, but this Notebook will walk you through it!
Custom Reference Text
"Retrieval Augmented Generation" is a QA model which will write out answers to your questions using whatever text dataset that you supply.
Basics of BERT on PyTorch
Word Embeddings
Learn the basics of BERT's input formatting, and how to extract "contextualized" word and sentence embeddings from text.
Fine-Tuning Basics Video Course
Learn the basics of fine-tuning BERT with PyTorch and the huggingface/transformers library.
Multi-GPU
See how to adapt any of our examples to train on a multi-GPU system.
...and more
Mixed Feature Types
Many applications include additional feature types besides just text, such as numbers and categories. Learn how to integrate these additional features with BERT.
Named Entity Recognition
Fine-tune BERT to recognize custom entity classes in a restaurant dataset.
RoBERTa
Facebook retrained the original BERT with a larger dataset and some training tweaks, and the result is a drop-in replacement with improved accuracy.
BigBird & Longformer
Learn how these models overcome BERT's sequence length limitation, allowing for longer text inputs! more
Text Generation ("seq2seq") Models
GPT-2
Though BERT excels at interpreting text and making predictions, it cannot generate new text. GPT-2 is a different Transformer-based model which includes this ability.
BART
BART is a more recent text generation model which outperforms GPT-2!
Membership also includes...
Topical Index
Easily find help for your topic. The index organizes all of my content, and recommends resources for additional topics.
Research Group Recordings
Nick and I host a research group 2-3 times a month to share our progress on our current research topic. Join us on Thursdays! Base Camp members also have access to the session recordings!
Ready to learn a whole new skill?
Hi, I'm Chris McCormick
I'm an author of eBooks, tutorial videos, and example code on a variety of Machine Learning topics--particularly on challenging subjects in NLP.
I'm best known for word2vec blog posts (recommended reading for Stanford's NLP class), BERT architecture YouTube series, and example code for a variety of BERT applications.
I earned my B.S. from Stanford in 2006 as a software engineer, and have been working in the areas of computer vision, machine learning, and NLP since 2012.
Style
My writing and speaking styles are characterized by levity and positioning myself as a fellow learner rather than an authority.
I love to create the tutorials that I wish I could have read--with an emphasis on thoroughness, while still being easy-to-follow.
Illustrations
I'm no graphic artist, but I do find that simple and colorful illustrations can aid greatly in an explanation, and keep you engaged in the learning process.
You'll often find my illustrations reused around the web.
I enjoy creating them and always end up wishing I could add more!
Example Code
It's usually not hard to find example code on the web, but it's rare that you'll find code that's well organized and commented, and that makes it clear what it does and doesn't do.
Colab Notebooks are a wonderful teaching tool because they allow me to:
- Divide code into (collapsible!) sections, with an outline in the sidebar.
- Insert formatted text cells and illustrations to help explain what's going on.
Beyond that, I like my code to be abundantly easy to read, and so it's rare to find a line of my code without a verbal explanation of what it does. (In other words, my code is thoroughly commented!)
Testimonials
Frequently Asked Questions
The majority of my content is focused on BERT and related models.
You'll find thorough tutorials on the architecture of BERT and how to apply it.
You'll also find tutorials on how to apply BERT to a variety of applications:
- Document Classification, including multiclass and multi-label.
- Question Answering
- Domain-specific text
- Non-English applications
- Named Entity Recognition
- Combining text with other feature types
- Variants of BERT
- ...
After BERT, the next topic with the most coverage is word2vec, with a video course, eBook, and example code.
Code is written in Python and shared in the form of Google Colaboratory Notebooks.
BERT examples are built on PyTorch and the 'transformers' library from huggingface.
With a few exceptions, my tutorials are not available to purchase individually or as a bundle.
However, you are always welcome to become a member for as many months as you need to go through the content that you are interested in. You are free to cancel your membership at any time.
