This open access book provides a comprehensive overview of the state of the art in research and applications of Foundation Models and is intended for readers familiar with basic Natural Language Processing (NLP) concepts.Over the recent years, a revolutionary new paradigm has been developed for training models for NLP. These models are first pre-trained on large collections of text documents to acquire general syntactic knowledge and semantic information. Then, they are fine-tuned for specific tasks, which they can often solve with superhuman accuracy. When the models are large enough, they...

This open access book provides a comprehensive overview of the state of the art in research and applications of Foundation Models and is intended for readers familiar with basic Natural Language Processing (NLP) concepts.Over the recent years, a revolutionary new paradigm has been developed for training models for NLP. These models are first pre-trained on large collections of text documents to acquire general syntactic knowledge and semantic information. Then, they are fine-tuned for specific tasks, which they can often solve with superhuman accuracy. When the models are large enough, they...