hmByT5 - Preliminary Language Models

Preliminary Historic Multilingual and Monolingual ByT5 Models. Following languages are currently covered:

English (British Library Corpus - Books)
German (Europeana Newspaper)
French (Europeana Newspaper)
Finnish (Europeana Newspaper)

More details can be found in our GitHub repository.

Pretraining

We use the official JAX/FLAX example in Hugging Face Transformers to pretrain a ByT5 model on a single v3-8 TPU. Details about the training can be found here.

Evaluation on Downstream Tasks (NER)

We evaluated the hmByT5 model on downstream tasks:

Model	English AjMC	German AjMC	French AjMC	Finnish NewsEye	Swedish NewsEye	Dutch ICDAR	French ICDAR	Avg.
`hmbyt5-preliminary/byt5-small-english-german-french-finnish`	85.30 ± 1.14	87.37 ± 0.53	84.12 ± 0.42

Acknowledgements

Research supported with Cloud TPUs from Google's TPU Research Cloud (TRC). Many Thanks for providing access to the TPUs ❤️