The Transformer is a deep learning model architecture introduced in the 2017 paper

titled "Attention Is All You Need" by Vaswani et al. It revolutionized the field of
natural language processing (NLP) and became the foundation for many subsequent
advancements in language understanding and generation tasks. The Transformer
model is based on the concept of self-attention, which allows it to capture long-
range dependencies in the input data efficiently.

Key components of the Transformer architecture are:

1. Self-Attention Mechanism: Self-attention is a mechanism that allows the

model to weigh the importance of different words in a sentence when
predicting a specific word. Instead of relying on fixed positional relationships
between words (like in recurrent neural networks), the Transformer calculates
attention weights for all words simultaneously. This helps the model
understand the interdependencies between words in a more flexible manner.
2. Encoder-Decoder Structure: The Transformer consists of two main parts: an
encoder and a decoder. The encoder processes the input data, such as a
sentence in a source language, and generates a representation called the
"contextualized embeddings" or "transformer embeddings." The decoder then
takes this representation and generates the output, such as a translated
sentence in a target language.
3. Positional Encoding: Since the Transformer doesn't use recurrent networks, it
needs a way to capture the order of words in the input sequence. Positional
encoding is introduced to provide each word with a unique position-based
embedding, which is added to the word's regular embedding. This positional
information is then used in the self-attention mechanism.