If you have been following us, or any AI news for that matter, you might have come across the term BERT, usually accompanied by a lot of excitement around what it’s capable of doing. But what is BERT? And why is the AI community excited about it? We will try to answer those questions in this article.
If this is the first time you hear about NLP, we highly recommend reading our non-technical introduction to NLP Making sense of NLP - Part I before continuing to get a more complete and nuanced picture of what AI models in this field can and can’t do.
BERT is an AI model within the field of Natural Language Processing or NLP. In short, it aims to make written human language understandable to a computer, so that it can carry out tasks that depend on the content of the text.
BERT isn’t the first AI model that was created for this purpose, but the reason why the AI community is excited about it is because it brought about a significant improvement to how well an AI model is able to understand text in context.
Since this is an introductory article to BERT, we will skip the technical details, but suffice to say that unlike prior models, BERT is able to correctly understand sequences of words in different contexts.