We study the effectiveness of contextualized embeddings for the task of diachronic semantic change detection for Russian language data. Evaluation test sets consist of Russian nouns and adjectives annotated based on their occurrences in texts created in pre-Soviet, Soviet and post-Soviet time periods. ELMo and BERT architectures are compared on the task of ranking Russian words according to the degree of their semantic change over time. We use several methods for aggregation of contextualized embeddings from these architectures and evaluate their performance. Finally, we compare unsupervised and supervised techniques in this task.
National Center for Biotechnology Information（国家生物技术信息中心）；National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health（美国国立卫生研究院国家医学图书馆）
Inspired by the success of the General Language Understanding Evaluation benchmark, we introduce the Biomedical Language Understanding Evaluation (BLUE) benchmark to facilitate research in the development of pre-training language representations in the biomedicine domain. The benchmark consists of five tasks with ten datasets that cover both biomedical and clinical texts with different dataset sizes and difficulties. We also evaluate several baselines based on BERT and ELMo and find that the BERT model pre-trained on PubMed abstracts and MIMIC-III clinical notes achieves the best results. We m…
Stanford University（斯坦福大学）；University of Toronto（多伦多大学）
Replacing static word embeddings with contextualized word representations has yielded significant improvements on many NLP tasks. However, just how contextual are the contextualized representations produced by models such as ELMo and BERT? Are there infinitely many context-specific representations for each word, or are words essentially assigned one of a finite number of word-sense representations? For one, we find that the contextualized representations of all words are not isotropic in any layer of the contextualizing model. While representations of the same word in different contexts still …
University of Ljubljana（卢布尔雅那大学）；Queen Mary University of London（伦敦玛丽女王大学）；Jožef Stefan Institute（约泽夫·斯蒂芬研究所）
The current dominance of deep neural networks in natural language processing is based on contextual embeddings such as ELMo, BERT, and BERT derivatives. Most existing work focuses on English; in contrast, we present here the first multilingual empirical comparison of two ELMo and several monolingual and multilingual BERT models using 14 tasks in nine languages. In monolingual settings, our analysis shows that monolingual BERT models generally dominate, with a few exceptions such as the dependency parsing task, where they are not competitive with ELMo models trained on large corpora. In cross-l…
University of Oslo（奥斯陆大学）；University of Trento（特伦托大学）
We describe a new addition to the WebVectors toolkit which is used to serve word embedding models over the Web. The new ELMoViz module adds support for contextualized embedding architectures, in particular for ELMo models. The provided visualizations follow the metaphor of `two-dimensional text' by showing lexical substitutes: words which are most semantically similar in context to the words of the input sentence. The system allows the user to change the ELMo layers from which token embeddings are inferred. It also conveys corpus information about the query words and their lexical substitutes …
Université Paris-Saclay（巴黎萨克雷大学）；CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心）；LIMSI（LIMSI实验室）；CEA（法国原子能和替代能源委员会）；List（List研究所）；Artificial Intelligence Research Center (AIRC)（人工智能研究中心）；AIST（日本产业技术综合研究所）
Due to the compelling improvements brought by BERT, many recent representation models adopted the Transformer architecture as their main building block, consequently inheriting the wordpiece tokenization system despite it not being intrinsically linked to the notion of Transformers. While this system is thought to achieve a good balance between the flexibility of characters and the efficiency of full words, using predefined wordpiece vocabularies from the general domain is not always suitable, especially when building models for specialized domains (e.g., the medical domain). Moreover, adoptin…
Bauman Moscow State Technical University（鲍曼莫斯科国立技术大学）；Lomonosov Moscow State University（罗蒙诺索夫莫斯科国立大学）
In this study, we test standard neural network architectures (CNN, LSTM, BiLSTM) and recently appeared BERT architectures on previous Russian sentiment evaluation datasets. We compare two variants of Russian BERT and show that for all sentiment tasks in this study the conversational variant of Russian BERT performs better. The best results were achieved by BERT-NLI model, which treats sentiment classification tasks as a natural language inference task. On one of the datasets, this model practically achieves the human level.
We propose BERMo, an architectural modification to BERT, which makes predictions based on a hierarchy of surface, syntactic and semantic language features. We use linear combination scheme proposed in Embeddings from Language Models (ELMo) to combine the scaled internal representations from different network depths. Our approach has two-fold benefits: (1) improved gradient flow for the downstream task as every layer has a direct connection to the gradients of the loss function and (2) increased representative power as the model no longer needs to copy the features learned in the shallower laye…
National Research University Higher School of Economics（国立研究型大学高等经济学院）
We investigate the performance of sentence embeddings models on several tasks for the Russian language. In our comparison, we include such tasks as multiple choice question answering, next sentence prediction, and paraphrase identification. We employ FastText embeddings as a baseline and compare it to ELMo and BERT embeddings. We conduct two series of experiments, using both unsupervised (i.e., based on similarity measure only) and supervised approaches for the tasks. Finally, we present datasets for multiple choice question answering and next sentence prediction in Russian.
Indian Institute of Technology (BHU)（印度理工学院（瓦拉纳西））
Contextualized word embeddings (CWE) such as provided by ELMo (Peters et al., 2018), Flair NLP (Akbik et al., 2018), or BERT (Devlin et al., 2019) are a major recent innovation in NLP. CWEs provide semantic vector representations of words depending on their respective context. Their advantage over static word embeddings has been shown for a number of tasks, such as text classification, sequence tagging, or machine translation. Since vectors of the same word type can vary depending on the respective context, they implicitly provide a model for word sense disambiguation (WSD). We introduce a sim…
Objective: This work aimed to demonstrate the effectiveness of a hybrid approach based on Sentence BERT model and retrofitting algorithm to compute relatedness between any two biomedical concepts. Materials and Methods: We generated concept vectors by encoding concept preferred terms using ELMo, BERT, and Sentence BERT models. We used BioELMo and Clinical ELMo. We used Ontology Knowledge Free (OKF) models like PubMedBERT, BioBERT, BioClinicalBERT, and Ontology Knowledge Injected (OKI) models like SapBERT, CoderBERT, KbBERT, and UmlsBERT. We trained all the BERT models using Siamese network on …
In the natural language processing literature, neural networks are becoming increasingly deeper and complex. The recent poster child of this trend is the deep language representation model, which includes BERT, ELMo, and GPT. These developments have led to the conviction that previous-generation, shallower neural networks for language understanding are obsolete. In this paper, however, we demonstrate that rudimentary, lightweight neural networks can still be made competitive without architecture changes, external training data, or additional input features. We propose to distill knowledge from…
University of Aberdeen（阿伯丁大学）；University of Sheffield（谢菲尔德大学）
We tackle the problem of identifying metaphors in text, treated as a sequence tagging task. The pre-trained word embeddings GloVe, ELMo and BERT have individually shown good performance on sequential metaphor identification. These embeddings are generated by different models, training targets and corpora, thus encoding different semantic and syntactic information. We show that leveraging GloVe, ELMo and feature-based BERT based on a multi-channel CNN and a Bidirectional LSTM model can significantly outperform any single word embedding method and the combination of the two embeddings. Incorpora…
The FakeNews task in MediaEval 2022 investigates the challenge of finding accurate and high-performance models for the classification of conspiracy tweets related to COVID-19. In this paper, we used BERT, ELMO, and their combination for feature extraction and RandomForest as classifier. The results show that ELMO performs slightly better than BERT, however their combination at feature level reduces the performance.
Contextual word embedding models such as ELMo (Peters et al., 2018) and BERT (Devlin et al., 2018) have dramatically improved performance for many natural language processing (NLP) tasks in recent months. However, these models have been minimally explored on specialty corpora, such as clinical text; moreover, in the clinical domain, no publicly-available pre-trained BERT models yet exist. In this work, we address this need by exploring and releasing BERT models for clinical text: one for generic clinical text and another for discharge summaries specifically. We demonstrate that using a domain-…
Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学计算机科学与工程系）；MoE Key Lab of Artificial Intelligence, AI Institute, Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学人工智能研究院人工智能教育部重点实验室）；College of Zhiyuan, Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学致远学院）
The latest work on language representations carefully integrates contextualized features into language model training, which enables a series of success especially in various machine reading comprehension and natural language inference tasks. However, the existing language representation models including ELMo, GPT and BERT only exploit plain context-sensitive features such as character or word embeddings. They rarely consider incorporating structured semantic information which can provide rich semantics for language representation. To promote natural language understanding, we propose to incor…
This paper presents several BERT-based models for Russian language biomedical text mining (RuBioBERT, RuBioRoBERTa). The models are pre-trained on a corpus of freely available texts in the Russian biomedical domain. With this pre-training, our models demonstrate state-of-the-art results on RuMedBench - Russian medical language understanding benchmark that covers a diverse set of tasks, including text classification, question answering, natural language inference, and named entity recognition.
Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski”（圣克莱门特·奥里季斯基索菲亚大学）；Qatar Computing Research Institute, HBKU（卡塔尔计算研究所（哈马德·本·哈利法大学））
Detecting the user's intent and finding the corresponding slots among the utterance's words are important tasks in natural language understanding. Their interconnected nature makes their joint modeling a standard part of training such models. Moreover, data scarceness and specialized vocabularies pose additional challenges. Recently, the advances in pre-trained language models, namely contextualized models such as ELMo and BERT have revolutionized the field by tapping the potential of training very large models with just a few steps of fine-tuning on a task-specific dataset. Here, we leverage …
We use the multilingual OSCAR corpus, extracted from Common Crawl via language classification, filtering and cleaning, to train monolingual contextualized word embeddings (ELMo) for five mid-resource languages. We then compare the performance of OSCAR-based and Wikipedia-based ELMo embeddings for these languages on the part-of-speech tagging and parsing tasks. We show that, despite the noise in the Common-Crawl-based OSCAR data, embeddings trained on OSCAR perform much better than monolingual embeddings trained on Wikipedia. They actually equal or improve the current state of the art in taggin…
New York University（纽约大学）；Johns Hopkins University（约翰斯·霍普金斯大学）；Brown University（布朗大学）；Google AI Language（谷歌AI语言部门）；Facebook（脸书）；University of Minnesota Duluth（明尼苏达大学德卢斯分校）；Swarthmore College（斯沃斯莫尔学院）；IBM
Natural language understanding has recently seen a surge of progress with the use of sentence encoders like ELMo (Peters et al., 2018a) and BERT (Devlin et al., 2019) which are pretrained on variants of language modeling. We conduct the first large-scale systematic study of candidate pretraining tasks, comparing 19 different tasks both as alternatives and complements to language modeling. Our primary results support the use language modeling, especially when combined with pretraining on additional labeled-data tasks. However, our results are mixed across pretraining tasks and show some concern…
University of Pittsburgh（匹兹堡大学）；Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）；Google, Inc.（谷歌公司）
Contextualized word embeddings derived from pre-trained language models (LMs) show significant improvements on downstream NLP tasks. Pre-training on domain-specific corpora, such as biomedical articles, further improves their performance. In this paper, we conduct probing experiments to determine what additional information is carried intrinsically by the in-domain trained contextualized embeddings. For this we use the pre-trained LMs as fixed feature extractors and restrict the downstream task models to not have additional sequence modeling layers. We compare BERT, ELMo, BioBERT and BioELMo, …
Sberbank Artificial Intelligence Laboratory（俄罗斯联邦储蓄银行人工智能实验室）；New York University（纽约大学）
In this paper we study the problem of predicting clinical diagnoses from textual Electronic Health Records (EHR) data. We show the importance of this problem in medical community and present comprehensive historical review of the problem and proposed methods. As the main scientific contributions we present a modification of Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) model for sequence classification that implements a novel way of Fully-Connected (FC) layer composition and a BERT model pretrained only on domain data. To empirically validate our model, we use a large-scale Ru…
Contextual word embeddings (e.g. GPT, BERT, ELMo, etc.) have demonstrated state-of-the-art performance on various NLP tasks. Recent work with the multilingual version of BERT has shown that the model performs very well in zero-shot and zero-resource cross-lingual settings, where only labeled English data is used to finetune the model. We improve upon multilingual BERT's zero-resource cross-lingual performance via adversarial learning. We report the magnitude of the improvement on the multilingual MLDoc text classification and CoNLL 2002/2003 named entity recognition tasks. Furthermore, we show…
Manipal Institute of Technology（马尼帕尔理工学院）；Elsevier Labs（爱思唯尔实验室）
Biomedical Named Entity Recognition (NER) is a challenging problem in biomedical information processing due to the widespread ambiguity of out of context terms and extensive lexical variations. Performance on bioNER benchmarks continues to improve due to advances like BERT, GPT, and XLNet. FLAIR (1) is an alternative embedding model which is less computationally intensive than the others mentioned. We test FLAIR and its pretrained PubMed embeddings (which we term BioFLAIR) on a variety of bio NER tasks and compare those with results from BERT-type networks. We also investigate the effects of a…
Black-box probing models can reliably extract linguistic features like tense, number, and syntactic role from pretrained word representations. However, the manner in which these features are encoded in representations remains poorly understood. We present a systematic study of the linear geometry of contextualized word representations in ELMO and BERT. We show that a variety of linguistic features (including structured dependency relationships) are encoded in low-dimensional subspaces. We then refine this geometric picture, showing that there are hierarchical relations between the subspaces en…
Institute of Informatics & Telecommunications, NCSR “Demokritos”（希腊德谟克利特国家科学研究中心信息学与电信研究所）；Department of Informatics, Athens University of Economics and Business（雅典经济与商业大学信息学系）
We investigate contract element extraction. We show that LSTM-based encoders perform better than dilated CNNs, Transformers, and BERT in this task. We also find that domain-specific WORD2VEC embeddings outperform generic pre-trained GLOVE embeddings. Morpho-syntactic features in the form of POS tag and token shape embeddings, as well as context-aware ELMO embeddings do not improve performance. Several of these observations contradict choices or findings of previous work on contract element extraction and generic sequence labeling tasks, indicating that contract element extraction requires care…
A number of morphology-based word embedding models were introduced in recent years. However, their evaluation was mostly limited to English, which is known to be a morphologically simple language. In this paper, we explore whether and to what extent incorporating morphology into word embeddings improves performance on downstream NLP tasks, in the case of morphologically rich Russian language. NLP tasks of our choice are POS tagging, Chunking, and NER -- for Russian language, all can be mostly solved using only morphology without understanding the semantics of words. Our experiments show that m…
Sense representations have gone beyond word representations like Word2Vec, GloVe and FastText and achieved innovative performance on a wide range of natural language processing tasks. Although very useful in many applications, the traditional approaches for generating word embeddings have a strict drawback: they produce a single vector representation for a given word ignoring the fact that ambiguous words can assume different meanings. In this paper, we explore unsupervised sense representations which, different from traditional word embeddings, are able to induce different senses of a word by…
Self-attentive neural syntactic parsers using contextualized word embeddings (e.g. ELMo or BERT) currently produce state-of-the-art results in joint parsing and disfluency detection in speech transcripts. Since the contextualized word embeddings are pre-trained on a large amount of unlabeled data, using additional unlabeled data to train a neural model might seem redundant. However, we show that self-training - a semi-supervised technique for incorporating unlabeled data - sets a new state-of-the-art for the self-attentive parser on disfluency detection, demonstrating that self-training provid…
A new metric \texttt{BaryScore} to evaluate text generation based on deep contextualized embeddings e.g., BERT, Roberta, ELMo) is introduced. This metric is motivated by a new framework relying on optimal transport tools, i.e., Wasserstein distance and barycenter. By modelling the layer output of deep contextualized embeddings as a probability distribution rather than by a vector embedding; this framework provides a natural way to aggregate the different outputs through the Wasserstein space topology. In addition, it provides theoretical grounds to our metric and offers an alternative to avail…
Georgetown University（乔治城大学）；Max Planck Institute for Informatics（马克斯·普朗克信息学研究所）；Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence（艾伦人工智能研究所）
Although considerable attention has been given to neural ranking architectures recently, far less attention has been paid to the term representations that are used as input to these models. In this work, we investigate how two pretrained contextualized language models (ELMo and BERT) can be utilized for ad-hoc document ranking. Through experiments on TREC benchmarks, we find that several existing neural ranking architectures can benefit from the additional context provided by contextualized language models. Furthermore, we propose a joint approach that incorporates BERT's classification vector…
Findings of the The RuATD Shared Task 2022 on Artificial Text Detection in Russian
ABBYY（ABBYY公司）；SberDevices（俄联邦储蓄银行设备部门）；AIRI（AIRI研究所）；Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology（斯科尔科沃科技学院）；Sber AI（俄联邦储蓄银行人工智能部）；HSE University（高等经济大学）；Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology（莫斯科物理技术学院）；Kazan Federal University（喀山联邦大学）
Word embeddings carry stereotypical connotations from the text they are trained on, which can lead to invalid inferences in downstream models that rely on them. We use this observation to design a mechanism for measuring stereotypes using the task of natural language inference. We demonstrate a reduction in invalid inferences via bias mitigation strategies on static word embeddings (GloVe). Further, we show that for gender bias, these techniques extend to contextualized embeddings when applied selectively only to the static components of contextualized embeddings (ELMo, BERT).
University of Oslo（奥斯陆大学）；University of Amsterdam（阿姆斯特丹大学）
We apply contextualised word embeddings to lexical semantic change detection in the SemEval-2020 Shared Task 1. This paper focuses on Subtask 2, ranking words by the degree of their semantic drift over time. We analyse the performance of two contextualising architectures (BERT and ELMo) and three change detection algorithms. We find that the most effective algorithms rely on the cosine similarity between averaged token embeddings and the pairwise distances between token embeddings. They outperform strong baselines by a large margin (in the post-evaluation phase, we have the best Subtask 2 subm…
We experiment with two recent contextualized word embedding methods (ELMo and BERT) in the context of open-domain argument search. For the first time, we show how to leverage the power of contextualized word embeddings to classify and cluster topic-dependent arguments, achieving impressive results on both tasks and across multiple datasets. For argument classification, we improve the state-of-the-art for the UKP Sentential Argument Mining Corpus by 20.8 percentage points and for the IBM Debater - Evidence Sentences dataset by 7.4 percentage points. For the understudied task of argument cluster…
The study of the applicability of the BERTScore metric was conducted to translation quality assessment at the sentence level for English -> Russian direction. Experiments were performed with a pre-trained Multilingual BERT as well as with a pair of Monolingual BERT models. To align monolingual embeddings, an orthogonal transformation based on anchor tokens was used. It was demonstrated that such transformation helps to prevent mismatching issue and shown that this approach gives better results than using embeddings of the Multilingual model. To improve the token matching process it is proposed…
Charles University（查理大学）；Faculty of Mathematics and Physics（数学与物理学院）；Institute of Formal and Applied Linguistics（形式与应用语言学研究所）
We present an extensive evaluation of three recently proposed methods for contextualized embeddings on 89 corpora in 54 languages of the Universal Dependencies 2.3 in three tasks: POS tagging, lemmatization, and dependency parsing. Employing the BERT, Flair and ELMo as pretrained embedding inputs in a strong baseline of UDPipe 2.0, one of the best-performing systems of the CoNLL 2018 Shared Task and an overall winner of the EPE 2018, we present a one-to-one comparison of the three contextualized word embedding methods, as well as a comparison with word2vec-like pretrained embeddings and with e…
University of Edinburgh（爱丁堡大学）；McGill University（麦吉尔大学）；Mila（米拉）；Indian Institute of Technology Madras（印度理工学院马德拉斯分校）；Robert Bosch Centre for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence (RBC-DSAI), Indian Institute of Technology Madras（印度理工学院马德拉斯分校罗伯特·博世数据科学与人工智能中心（RBC-DSAI））
We consider the task of generating dialogue responses from background knowledge comprising of domain specific resources. Specifically, given a conversation around a movie, the task is to generate the next response based on background knowledge about the movie such as the plot, review, Reddit comments etc. This requires capturing structural, sequential and semantic information from the conversation context and the background resources. This is a new task and has not received much attention from the community. We propose a new architecture that uses the ability of BERT to capture deep contextual…
Biomedical word embeddings are usually pre-trained on free text corpora with neural methods that capture local and global distributional properties. They are leveraged in downstream tasks using various neural architectures that are designed to optimize task-specific objectives that might further tune such embeddings. Since 2018, however, there is a marked shift from these static embeddings to contextual embeddings motivated by language models (e.g., ELMo, transformers such as BERT, and ULMFiT). These dynamic embeddings have the added benefit of being able to distinguish homonyms and acronyms g…
University of Oxford（牛津大学）；DeepMind（深度思维）；University College London（伦敦大学学院）；The Alan Turing Institute（艾伦·图灵研究所）
Contextual embeddings, such as ELMo and BERT, move beyond global word representations like Word2Vec and achieve ground-breaking performance on a wide range of natural language processing tasks. Contextual embeddings assign each word a representation based on its context, thereby capturing uses of words across varied contexts and encoding knowledge that transfers across languages. In this survey, we review existing contextual embedding models, cross-lingual polyglot pre-training, the application of contextual embeddings in downstream tasks, model compression, and model analyses.
We present a novel online algorithm that learns the essence of each dimension in word embeddings by minimizing the within-group distance of contextualized embedding groups. Three state-of-the-art neural-based language models are used, Flair, ELMo, and BERT, to generate contextualized word embeddings such that different embeddings are generated for the same word type, which are grouped by their senses manually annotated in the SemCor dataset. We hypothesize that not all dimensions are equally important for downstream tasks so that our algorithm can detect unessential dimensions and discard them…
Most words are ambiguous--i.e., they convey distinct meanings in different contexts--and even the meanings of unambiguous words are context-dependent. Both phenomena present a challenge for NLP. Recently, the advent of contextualized word embeddings has led to success on tasks involving lexical ambiguity, such as Word Sense Disambiguation. However, there are few tasks that directly evaluate how well these contextualized embeddings accommodate the more continuous, dynamic nature of word meaning--particularly in a way that matches human intuitions. We introduce RAW-C, a dataset of graded, human …
Bar Ilan University（巴伊兰大学）；Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence（艾伦人工智能研究所）
Contextualized word representations, such as ELMo and BERT, were shown to perform well on various semantic and syntactic tasks. In this work, we tackle the task of unsupervised disentanglement between semantics and structure in neural language representations: we aim to learn a transformation of the contextualized vectors, that discards the lexical semantics, but keeps the structural information. To this end, we automatically generate groups of sentences which are structurally similar but semantically different, and use metric-learning approach to learn a transformation that emphasizes the str…
Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）；Google Research（谷歌研究院）；Facebook AI Research（脸书人工智能研究院）；Georgia Institute of Technology（佐治亚理工学院）
Contextualized word embeddings such as ELMo and BERT provide a foundation for strong performance across a wide range of natural language processing tasks by pretraining on large corpora of unlabeled text. However, the applicability of this approach is unknown when the target domain varies substantially from the pretraining corpus. We are specifically interested in the scenario in which labeled data is available in only a canonical source domain such as newstext, and the target domain is distinct from both the labeled and pretraining texts. To address this scenario, we propose domain-adaptive f…
Grammatical error detection (GED) in non-native writing requires systems to identify a wide range of errors in text written by language learners. Error detection as a purely supervised task can be challenging, as GED datasets are limited in size and the label distributions are highly imbalanced. Contextualized word representations offer a possible solution, as they can efficiently capture compositional information in language and can be optimized on large amounts of unsupervised data. In this paper, we perform a systematic comparison of ELMo, BERT and Flair embeddings (Peters et al., 2017; Dev…
Recent state-of-the-art natural language understanding models, such as BERT and XLNet, score a pair of sentences (A and B) using multiple cross-attention operations - a process in which each word in sentence A attends to all words in sentence B and vice versa. As a result, computing the similarity between a query sentence and a set of candidate sentences, requires the propagation of all query-candidate sentence-pairs throughout a stack of cross-attention layers. This exhaustive process becomes computationally prohibitive when the number of candidate sentences is large. In contrast, sentence em…
NLP Ghana（加纳自然语言处理组织）；Algorine；Leuphana University Luneburg（吕讷堡洛伊法纳大学）；University of Cape Coast（海岸角大学）；Edinburgh Napier University（爱丁堡龙比亚大学）；Accra Institute of Technology（阿克拉理工学院）；Tulane University（杜兰大学）；University of Tromso（特罗姆瑟大学）；AiMlCamp；University of Strathclyde（斯特拉斯克莱德大学）；Azubi Africa；Ulster University（阿尔斯特大学）；Centre for Research, Data Science and IT Solutions（研究、数据科学与IT解决方案中心）；University of Energy and Natural Resources（能源与自然资源大学）；Integrated Geospatial Intelligence Application Centre（综合地理空间情报应用中心）；SRH Berlin University of Applied Science（SRH柏林应用科学大学）
Transformer-based language models have been changing the modern Natural Language Processing (NLP) landscape for high-resource languages such as English, Chinese, Russian, etc. However, this technology does not yet exist for any Ghanaian language. In this paper, we introduce the first of such models for Twi or Akan, the most widely spoken Ghanaian language. The specific contribution of this research work is the development of several pretrained transformer language models for the Akuapem and Asante dialects of Twi, paving the way for advances in application areas such as Named Entity Recognitio…
