---
license: mit
language:
- en
- de
- fr
---

# 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)

More details can be found in [our GitHub repository](https://github.com/stefan-it/hmByT5).

# 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](https://github.com/stefan-it/hmByT5/tree/main/hmbyt5-flax).

# 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`](https://huggingface.co/hmbyt5-preliminary/byt5-small-english-german-french)                                             | 85.61 ± 0.96 | 87.24 ± 0.76 | 84.39 ± 0.68 |                 |                 |              |              |      |

# Acknowledgements

Research supported with Cloud TPUs from Google's [TPU Research Cloud](https://sites.research.google/trc/about/) (TRC).
Many Thanks for providing access to the TPUs ❤️