with tf.control_dependencies([assert_op]):
      full_position_embeddings = tf.get_variable(
          name=position_embedding_name,
          shape=[max_position_embeddings, width],
          initializer=create_initializer(initializer_range))
      # Since the position embedding table is a learned variable, we create it
      # using a (long) sequence length `max_position_embeddings`. The actual
      # sequence length might be shorter than this, for faster training of
      # tasks that do not have long sequences.
      #    
      # So `full_position_embeddings` is effectively an embedding table
      # for position [0, 1, 2, ..., max_position_embeddings-1], and the current
      # sequence has positions [0, 1, 2, ... seq_length-1], so we can just
      # perform a slice.
      position_embeddings = tf.slice(full_position_embeddings, [0, 0],
                                     [seq_length, -1]) 
      num_dims = len(output.shape.as_list())

      # Only the last two dimensions are relevant (`seq_length` and `width`), so
      # we broadcast among the first dimensions, which is typically just
      # the batch size.
      position_broadcast_shape = [] 
      for _ in range(num_dims - 2):
        position_broadcast_shape.append(1)
      position_broadcast_shape.extend([seq_length, width])
      position_embeddings = tf.reshape(position_embeddings,
                                       position_broadcast_shape)
      output += position_embeddings