Leo Dirac (@leopd) talks about how LSTM models for Natural Language Processing (NLP) have been practically replaced by transformer-based models. Basic background on NLP, and a brief history of supervised learning techniques on documents, from bag of words, through vanilla RNNs and LSTM. Then there's a technical deep dive into how Transformers work with multi-headed self-attention, and positional encoding. Includes sample code for applying these ideas to real-world projects.