How Large Language Models are Revolutionizing Natural Language Processing

9 min readNov 14, 2022

Natural language processing (NLP) is the field of computer science that deals with understanding and generating natural language, such as speech and text. NLP has many applications in our daily lives, such as chatbots, voice assistants, search engines, and machine translation. However, NLP is also a challenging and complex domain, as natural language is rich, diverse, ambiguous, and context-dependent.

In recent years, a new paradigm has emerged in NLP, based on the use of large language models. These are neural networks that are trained on massive amounts of text data, such as the entire Wikipedia or the Common Crawl corpus, and learn to predict the next word or token given a sequence of previous words or tokens. These models can capture the statistical patterns and the semantic and syntactic relationships of natural language, and can generate coherent and fluent text on various topics and domains.

Large language models have shown remarkable results in performing a wide range of NLP tasks, such as text generation, summarization, translation, question answering, and sentiment analysis, with minimal or no fine-tuning. Fine-tuning is the process of adapting a pre-trained model to a specific task or domain by updating its parameters with a smaller and more relevant dataset. Large language models can often achieve state-of-the-art performance on these tasks by simply using a technique called prompting, which consists of providing the model with a natural language input that specifies the desired output or task. For example, to generate a summary of a text, one can simply prepend the text with “Summary:” and let the model complete the sentence.

In this article, we will explore how large language models are revolutionizing NLP, and what are the challenges and opportunities of using them for natural language processing. We will cover the following topics:

How large language models are trained and how they work
How large language models can perform various NLP tasks with prompting and fine-tuning
What are the benefits and limitations of large language models for NLP
What are the ethical and social implications of large language models for NLP
How large language models can be scaled and improved in the future

How large language models are trained and how they work

Large language models are based on a type of neural network architecture called transformer, which was introduced in 2017 by Vaswani et al. in the paper “Attention is All You Need”. Transformers are composed of layers of self-attention and feed-forward modules, which allow them to process sequential data, such as text, without using recurrent or convolutional operations. Self-attention is a mechanism that enables the model to learn the relevance and the relationship of each word or token in a sequence with respect to the others, and to encode the contextual information of the sequence in a vector representation.

The most common way to train large language models is to use a masked language modeling objective, which is also known as a cloze task. This objective consists of randomly masking some words or tokens in a text sequence, and asking the model to predict the original words or tokens based on the surrounding context. For example, given the sentence “The cat sat on the ___”, the model should predict the word “mat”. This objective forces the model to learn the syntax, semantics, and common sense of natural language, and to generate plausible and coherent text.

Some of the most popular and influential large language models are:

BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers), which was introduced in 2018 by Devlin et al. in the paper “BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding”. BERT is a transformer-based model that uses masked language modeling and next-sentence prediction as pre-training objectives, and can be fine-tuned for various NLP tasks, such as classification, named entity recognition, and question answering. BERT has several variants, such as BERT-base (110 million parameters), BERT-large (340 million parameters), and BERT-whole-word-masking (which masks whole words instead of subwords).
GPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer), which was introduced in 2018 by Radford et al. in the paper “Improving Language Understanding by Generative Pre-Training”. GPT is a transformer-based model that uses a causal language modeling objective, which means that it predicts the next word or token based on the previous ones, and ignores the future ones. GPT can be used for text generation and can be fine-tuned for various NLP tasks, such as classification, summarization, and translation. GPT has several variants, such as GPT (117 million parameters), GPT-2 (1.5 billion parameters), and GPT-3 (175 billion parameters).
T5 (Text-to-Text Transfer Transformer), which was introduced in 2019 by Raffel et al. in the paper “Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer”. T5 is a transformer-based model that uses a text-to-text framework, which means that it treats every NLP task as a text generation problem, and uses a single encoder-decoder architecture and a single pre-training objective, which is masked language modeling. T5 can be used for various NLP tasks, such as summarization, translation, question answering, and text simplification. T5 has several variants, such as T5-small (60 million parameters), T5-base (220 million parameters), T5-large (770 million parameters), T5–3B (3 billion parameters), and T5–11B (11 billion parameters).

How large language models can perform various NLP tasks with prompting and fine-tuning

Large language models can perform various NLP tasks with two main methods: prompting and fine-tuning.

Prompting is the technique of providing the model with a natural language input that specifies the desired output or task, and letting the model generate the answer or the result. For example, to generate a summary of a text, one can simply prepend the text with “Summary:” and let the model complete the sentence. Prompting can be seen as a form of zero-shot or few-shot learning, as it does not require any additional training or data for the specific task or domain. Prompting can also be enhanced by using templates, which are predefined formats or structures that guide the model to generate the output in a certain way. For example, to generate a summary of a text in bullet points, one can use a template like “Summary:\n- {first point}\n- {second point}\n- {third point}” and let the model fill in the blanks.

Fine-tuning is the process of adapting a pre-trained model to a specific task or domain by updating its parameters with a smaller and more relevant dataset. Fine-tuning can be seen as a form of transfer learning, as it leverages the general knowledge and the linguistic skills that the model has learned from the large-scale pre-training data, and applies them to the specific task or domain. Fine-tuning can also be enhanced by using adapters, which are small and task-specific modules that are inserted between the layers of the pre-trained model, and can be trained with a lower computational cost and a lower risk of overfitting.

Both prompting and fine-tuning have their advantages and disadvantages. Prompting is more flexible and versatile, as it can be applied to any task or domain without any additional training or data. However, prompting is also more dependent on the quality and the format of the input, and may not always generate the optimal or the correct output. Fine-tuning is more reliable and consistent, as it can optimize the model for the specific task or domain with a higher accuracy and a higher performance. However, fine-tuning is also more costly and time-consuming, as it requires additional training and data, and may suffer from the issues of data scarcity, data bias, and catastrophic forgetting.

What are the benefits and limitations of large language models for NLP

Large language models have many benefits and limitations for NLP, which can be summarized as follows:

Benefits:

They can perform a wide range of NLP tasks with minimal or no fine-tuning, and achieve state-of-the-art results on many benchmarks and datasets.
They can generate fluent and coherent text on various topics and domains, and handle complex and diverse natural language phenomena, such as long-range dependencies, idioms, metaphors, and humor.
They can learn from a large and diverse amount of text data, and capture the general knowledge and the linguistic skills of natural language, such as syntax, semantics, and common sense.
They can enable new and innovative applications and use cases for NLP, such as conversational agents, content creation, knowledge extraction, and education.

Limitations:

They require a huge amount of computational resources and energy to train and run, which poses challenges for scalability, accessibility, and sustainability.
They rely on a large and diverse amount of text data, which may not always be available, reliable, or representative of the real-world scenarios and the human values and preferences.
They may generate inaccurate, inconsistent, or harmful text, which may cause ethical, social, and legal issues, such as misinformation, plagiarism, bias, discrimination, and privacy violation.
They may not always understand the meaning, the intention, or the implication of the text they process or generate, and may not be able to explain or justify their outputs or decisions.

What are the ethical and social implications of large language models for NLP

Large language models have significant ethical and social implications for NLP, as they can affect the way we communicate, access, and use information, and the way we interact with machines and with each other. Some of the ethical and social implications of large language models for NLP are:

Misinformation and manipulation: Large language models can generate realistic and convincing text, which can be used to create fake news, propaganda, spam, phishing, and other forms of misinformation and manipulation. These can have negative consequences for public opinion, democracy, security, and trust in the information sources and the authorities.
Plagiarism and intellectual property: Large language models can generate original and creative text, which can be used to produce content, such as articles, books, essays, and reviews, without the consent or the attribution of the original authors or sources. This can have negative consequences for academic integrity, artistic expression, copyright, and the recognition and reward of the content creators.
Bias and discrimination: Large language models can reflect and amplify the bias and discrimination that exist in the text data they are trained on, which can be influenced by cultural, historical, and social factors and human values and preferences. This can have negative consequences for the fairness, diversity, inclusion, and respect of the individuals and the groups that are affected by bias and discrimination, such as minorities, women, and marginalized communities.
Privacy and security: Large language models can infer and reveal sensitive and personal information, such as names, addresses, phone numbers, and credit card numbers, from the text data they process or generate, which can be used for malicious or illegal purposes, such as identity theft, fraud, and blackmail. This can have negative consequences for the privacy, security, and dignity of the individuals and the organizations that are affected by How large language models can be scaled and improved in the future

Large language models can be scaled and improved in the future by using various techniques and approaches, such as:

Data quality and diversity: Large language models can be trained on more high-quality and diverse text data, which can cover more topics, domains, languages, and genres, and which can be curated, filtered, and annotated to ensure the reliability, representativeness, and the relevance of the data for the NLP tasks and the real-world scenarios.
Model architecture and efficiency: Large language models can use more advanced and efficient model architectures, which can improve the performance, scalability, and interpretability of the models, and which can reduce the computational cost and the energy consumption of the models. Some examples of such architectures are sparse transformers, reversible transformers, and transformer-free models.
Task formulation and evaluation: Large language models can use more effective and robust task formulation and evaluation methods, which can measure the quality, consistency, and diversity of the outputs or the results of the models, and which can account for the complexity and the diversity of the natural language phenomena and the human expectations and preferences. Some examples of such methods are natural language inference, textual entailment, and human evaluation.
Ethical and social awareness and responsibility: Large language models can use more ethical and social awareness and responsibility principles and practices, which can ensure the safety, fairness, accountability, and transparency of the models, and which can respect and protect the rights, the values, and the interests of the individuals and the groups that are involved or affected by the models. Some examples of such principles and practices are data protection, informed consent, data minimization, and explainable AI.

Conclusion

Large language models are revolutionizing NLP, as they can perform a wide range of NLP tasks with minimal or no fine-tuning, and generate fluent and coherent text on various topics and domains. However, large language models also pose challenges and opportunities for NLP, as they require a huge amount of computational resources and energy, rely on a large and diverse amount of text data, and may generate inaccurate, inconsistent, or harmful text. Therefore, large language models need to be scaled and improved in the future, by using various techniques and approaches, such as data quality and diversity, model architecture and efficiency, task formulation and evaluation, and ethical and social awareness and responsibility. By doing so, large language models can enable new and innovative applications and use cases for NLP, and enhance the communication, access, and use of information, and the interaction with machines and with each other.