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CamemBERT: a Tasty French Language Model

2019-11-10ACL 2020Code Available0· sign in to hype

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

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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.

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Benchmark Results

DatasetModelMetricClaimedVerifiedStatus
French GSDCamemBERTLAS92.47Unverified
ParTUTCamemBERTLAS92.9Unverified
Sequoia TreebankCamemBERTLAS94.39Unverified
Spoken CorpusCamemBERTLAS81.37Unverified

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