December 23, 2019

Google’s New Algorithm: Meet BERT

BERT. It stands for Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers. It’s Google’s newest algorithmic update, and it’s a large update that will impact around 10% of queries, as well as featured bits and organic rankings.

Essentially, what BERT does is help Google better comprehend natural language. It is also a research paper and machine learning natural language processing framework, that has caused search activity to skyrocket.

The best way to understand BERT is to understand the way that computers have had difficulty understanding language in the past. Until natural language processing came around, computers were mainly able to store text and receive the entered text.

The advent of natural language processing made it possible for researchers to develop things such as named entity recognition, classification, sentiment analysis, and question and answering, which made it possible to solve for specific types of language understanding.

Natural Learning Process models were individual tools, each with their own specific, expert task. However, BERT has revolutionized the NLP model by combining and streamlining 11 of the top functions of NLPs, allowing for one tool instead of eleven.

BERT has made strides in natural language understanding, essentially changing natural learning processing forever. Machine learning communities anticipate BERT relieving the huge burden that has accompanied their ability to perform research in natural language, as it has been pre-trained on the entire English Wikipedia of 2,500,000 words.

The evolution of BERT

There are a number of different BERT versions out there, and it is expected that BERT will continue to progress. BERT began when Google took text from Wikipedia, combined with loads of money, computational power, and used an unsupervised neural network for training all of Wikipedia’s text to understand language and context.

They were able to train BERT to take any length of text and transcribe it into a vector, which is a fixed string of numbers, making it translatable to a machine. BERT looks at the words before and after a masked, or hidden, word, in order to predict what the hidden word is.

By performing this function repeatedly, BERT becomes proficient in predicting masked words, as well as in performing 11 of the most common tasks of the natural language process.

BERT as a solution for companies

BERT is an incredible solution for companies because it opens their machines up to greater efficiency and accuracy in understanding the things that humans, as well as machines, haven’t yet been able to understand.

Every company has to work with millions of words on a daily basis, many of them difficult to deal with due to being ambiguous, polysemous, and synonymous. BERT is able to solve the difficult sentences and phrases that are a combination of numerous multi-faceted words.

Due to the fact that many words have tons of meanings, search engines and machines have thus far had difficulty determining the proper use of the word in context. And the longer a sentence or phrase is, the more difficult it becomes. BERT provides a solution for this problem, helping search engines to fill in the gaps and determine the proper message, by learning how to provide context.

BERT provides solutions by helping Google to better understand the human language, making an incredible difference in how Google interprets queries, as well as impacting voice search and SEO.

With the certain progression and updates of BERT, users can rest assured that Key Medium and the Running SEO team will continuously keep their websites prepared for updates, allowing it to function seamlessly. Every change will be put into place without users needing to do a thing, allowing their machines and processes to flow without pause.

Many think that BERT is a revolutionary update, bringing business into the next phase of technological prowess. While that very well may be the case, only time will tell.

Sources:

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/bert-explained-what-you-need-to-know-about-googles-new-algorithm/337247/
https://moz.com/blog/what-is-bert

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