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)
Swedish (Europeana Newspaper)
Dutch (Delpher Corpus)

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-swedish-dutch`	85.51 ± 0.68	87.58 ± 0.39	84.39 ± 0.83	55.46 ± 1.99	73.38 ± 2.45	84.80 ± 0.44	75.97 ± 0.55

Acknowledgements

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