Using your own tokenizer

Often you want to use your own tokenizer to segment sentences instead of the default one from BERT. Simply call encode(is_tokenized=True) on the client slide as follows:

texts = ['hello world!', 'good day']

# a naive whitespace tokenizer
texts2 = [s.split() for s in texts]

vecs = bc.encode(texts2, is_tokenized=True)

This gives [2, 25, 768] tensor where the first [1, 25, 768] corresponds to the token-level encoding of “hello world!”. If you look into its values, you will find that only the first four elements, i.e. [1, 0:3, 768] have values, all the others are zeros. This is due to the fact that BERT considers “hello world!” as four tokens: [CLS] hello world! [SEP], the rest are padding symbols and are masked out before output.

Note

There is no need to start a separate server for handling tokenized/untokenized sentences. The server can tell and handle both cases automatically.

Warning

The pretrained BERT Chinese from Google is character-based, i.e. its vocabulary is made of single Chinese characters. Therefore it makes no sense if you use word-level segmentation algorithm to pre-process the data and feed to such model.