BERT

Updated: 11/12/2023 by Computer Hope

BERT may refer to any of the following:

Magnifying glass examining bits.

1. Short for bit error rate tester, a BERT is a device that performs a bit error rate test, a procedure that calculates the error rate of a transmission.

Most BERTs are specialized, standalone systems, but they can also run from a desktop computer. A BERT works by generating a known pattern of binary digits, which it transmits through a communication system. Then, it compares the received pattern with the original one to determine the rate of bit errors. If any errors are found, they are counted as a ratio, like 1 in 10,000 or 1 in 100,000.

Robot speaking in binary.

2. Released by Google in 2018, BERT (bidirectional encoder representations from transformers) is a machine-learning technique for natural-language processing. Essentially, BERT is a tool that helps computers better understand human language.

BERT is designed to understand the context of words in a sentence by considering the surrounding words before and after. This bidirectional approach allows it to capture the nuances of language more effectively. BERT is pre-trained on a large data set of text, nearly 2.5 billion words from Wikipedia and 800 million words from BookCorpus. Its architecture is based on the transformer model, a standard in many NLP (natural language processing) applications.

BERT can then be fine-tuned for specific natural-language processing tasks, such as text classification, NER (named-entity recognition), and answering questions. BERT is significant in that it has achieved state-of-the-art performance on various NLP tasks. Some of these benchmarks include the SQuAD (Stanford Question Answering Dataset), GLUE (General Language Understanding Evaluation), and SWAG (Situations With Adversarial Generations).

BER, Bit, Computer abbreviations, CRC, Error control, Network terms, Parity, Task