The birth of Romanian BERT

Stefan Dumitrescu, Andrei-Marius Avram, Sampo Pyysalo


Abstract
Large-scale pretrained language models have become ubiquitous in Natural Language Processing. However, most of these models are available either in high-resource languages, in particular English, or as multilingual models that compromise performance on individual languages for coverage. This paper introduces Romanian BERT, the first purely Romanian transformer-based language model, pretrained on a large text corpus. We discuss corpus com-position and cleaning, the model training process, as well as an extensive evaluation of the model on various Romanian datasets. We opensource not only the model itself, but also a repository that contains information on how to obtain the corpus, fine-tune and use this model in production (with practical examples), and how to fully replicate the evaluation process.
Anthology ID:
2020.findings-emnlp.387
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2020
Month:
November
Year:
2020
Address:
Online
Editors:
Trevor Cohn, Yulan He, Yang Liu
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
4324–4328
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.findings-emnlp.387
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.findings-emnlp.387
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Stefan Dumitrescu, Andrei-Marius Avram, and Sampo Pyysalo. 2020. The birth of Romanian BERT. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2020, pages 4324–4328, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
The birth of Romanian BERT (Dumitrescu et al., Findings 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.findings-emnlp.387.pdf
Code
 dumitrescustefan/Romanian-Transformers