A Gentle Introduction to Positional Encoding in Transformer Models, Part 1
In languages, the order of the words and their position in a sentence really matters. The meaning of the entire sentence can change if the words are re-ordered. When implementing NLP solutions, recurrent neural networks have an inbuilt mechanism that deals with the order of sequences. The transformer model, however, does not use recurrence or convolution and treats each data point as independent of the other. Hence, positional information is added to the model explicitly to retain the information regarding the order of words in a sentence. Positional encoding is the scheme through which the knowledge of the order of objects in a sequence is maintained.
For this tutorial, we’ll simplify the notations used in this remarkable paper,