Which architecture is used for natural language processing?

• A. Transformer architecture
• B. Convolutional neural networks
• C. Long short-term memory (LSTM) networks
• D. Data collection and preprocessing

Answer: (A)

In natural language processing, modeling how words relate to each other across a sentence or document is crucial, and doing so efficiently at scale is a major goal. The transformer architecture achieves this with self-attention, which allows every word to interact with every other word in a sequence and to weigh those relationships dynamically. This means the model can capture context from the entire input, not just nearby words, which is essential for understanding meaning, tone, and syntax in language.

Transformers are also highly parallelizable, so they train faster on large text corpora and scale well as data grows. This combination of effectively modeling long-range dependencies and enabling large-scale pretraining has made transformers the foundation for many state-of-the-art NLP systems (like BERT and GPT variants) that are fine-tuned for a wide range of language tasks.

Convolutional networks focus on local patterns and can miss long-range dependencies, while LSTM-based models handle sequences but rely on sequential processing, which can be slower and less effective at long-range context. Data collection and preprocessing are important steps, but they are not architectures themselves.