In the last few decades, text mining has been used to extract knowledge from free texts. Applying neural networks and deep learning to natural language processing (NLP) tasks has led to many accomplishments for real-world language problems over the years. The developments of the last five years have resulted in techniques that have allowed for the practical application of transfer learning in NLP. The advances in the field have been substantial, and the milestone of outperforming human baseline performance based on the general language understanding evaluation has been achieved. This paper implements a targeted literature review to outline, describe, explain, and put into context the crucial techniques that helped achieve this milestone. The research presented here is a targeted review of neural language models that present vital steps towards a general language representation model.
Keywords: attention-based models; deep learning; embeddings; multi-task learning; natural language processing; neural networks; transformer.