CamemBERT: a Tasty French Language Model

Louis Martin, Benjamin Muller, Pedro Javier Ortiz Suárez, Yoann Dupont, Laurent Romary, Éric de la Clergerie, Djamé Seddah, Benoît Sagot


Abstract
Pretrained language models are now ubiquitous in Natural Language Processing. Despite their success, most available models have either been trained on English data or on the concatenation of data in multiple languages. This makes practical use of such models –in all languages except English– very limited. In this paper, we investigate the feasibility of training monolingual Transformer-based language models for other languages, taking French as an example and evaluating our language models on part-of-speech tagging, dependency parsing, named entity recognition and natural language inference tasks. We show that the use of web crawled data is preferable to the use of Wikipedia data. More surprisingly, we show that a relatively small web crawled dataset (4GB) leads to results that are as good as those obtained using larger datasets (130+GB). Our best performing model CamemBERT reaches or improves the state of the art in all four downstream tasks.
Anthology ID:
2020.acl-main.645
Volume:
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Month:
July
Year:
2020
Address:
Online
Editors:
Dan Jurafsky, Joyce Chai, Natalie Schluter, Joel Tetreault
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
7203–7219
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.acl-main.645
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.acl-main.645
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Louis Martin, Benjamin Muller, Pedro Javier Ortiz Suárez, Yoann Dupont, Laurent Romary, Éric de la Clergerie, Djamé Seddah, and Benoît Sagot. 2020. CamemBERT: a Tasty French Language Model. In Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 7203–7219, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
CamemBERT: a Tasty French Language Model (Martin et al., ACL 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.acl-main.645.pdf
Video:
 http://slideslive.com/38929193
Code
 huggingface/transformers +  additional community code
Data
French WikipediaCCNetMultiNLIXNLI