readme: add initial version

README.md

@@ -0,0 +1,31 @@
+---
+license: mit
+language:
+- en
+---
+
+# hmByT5 - Preliminary Language Models
+
+Preliminary Historic Multilingual and Monolingual ByT5 Models. Following languages are currently covered:
+
+* English (British Library Corpus - Books)
+
+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/byt5-small-english`](https://huggingface.co/hmbyt5/byt5-small-english)                                                                                                 | 85.65 ± 1.21 | 87.27 ± 0.50 | 84.44 ± 0.79 |                 |                 |              |              |      |
+
+# 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 ❤️