RoBERTuito: a pre-trained language model for social media text in Spanish

Juan Manuel Pérez, Damián Ariel Furman, Laura Alonso Alemany, Franco M. Luque


Abstract
Since BERT appeared, Transformer language models and transfer learning have become state-of-the-art for natural language processing tasks. Recently, some works geared towards pre-training specially-crafted models for particular domains, such as scientific papers, medical documents, user-generated texts, among others. These domain-specific models have been shown to improve performance significantly in most tasks; however, for languages other than English, such models are not widely available. In this work, we present RoBERTuito, a pre-trained language model for user-generated text in Spanish, trained on over 500 million tweets. Experiments on a benchmark of tasks involving user-generated text showed that RoBERTuito outperformed other pre-trained language models in Spanish. In addition to this, our model has some cross-lingual abilities, achieving top results for English-Spanish tasks of the Linguistic Code-Switching Evaluation benchmark (LinCE) and also competitive performance against monolingual models in English Twitter tasks. To facilitate further research, we make RoBERTuito publicly available at the HuggingFace model hub together with the dataset used to pre-train it.
Anthology ID:
2022.lrec-1.785
Volume:
Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
June
Year:
2022
Address:
Marseille, France
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Frédéric Béchet, Philippe Blache, Khalid Choukri, Christopher Cieri, Thierry Declerck, Sara Goggi, Hitoshi Isahara, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Hélène Mazo, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association
Note:
Pages:
7235–7243
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.lrec-1.785
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Juan Manuel Pérez, Damián Ariel Furman, Laura Alonso Alemany, and Franco M. Luque. 2022. RoBERTuito: a pre-trained language model for social media text in Spanish. In Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 7235–7243, Marseille, France. European Language Resources Association.
Cite (Informal):
RoBERTuito: a pre-trained language model for social media text in Spanish (Pérez et al., LREC 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.lrec-1.785.pdf
Code
 pysentimiento/robertuito
Data
LinCE