IndicBERT is a multilingual ALBERT model pretrained exclusively on 12 major Indian languages. It is pre-trained on our novel monolingual corpus of around 9 billion tokens and subsequently evaluated on a set of diverse tasks. IndicBERT has much fewer parameters than other multilingual models (mBERT, XLM-R etc.) while it also achieves a performance on-par or better than these models.
The 12 languages covered by IndicBERT are: Assamese, Bengali, English, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Oriya, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu.
The code can be found here . For more information, checkout our project page or our paper .
We pre-trained indic-bert on AI4Bharat's monolingual corpus. The corpus has the following distribution of languages:
Language | as | bn | en | gu | hi | kn | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
No. of Tokens | 36.9M | 815M | 1.34B | 724M | 1.84B | 712M | |
Language | ml | mr | or | pa | ta | te | all |
No. of Tokens | 767M | 560M | 104M | 814M | 549M | 671M | 8.9B |
IndicBERT is evaluated on IndicGLUE and some additional tasks. The results are summarized below. For more details about the tasks, refer our official repo
IndicGLUETask | mBERT | XLM-R | IndicBERT |
---|---|---|---|
News Article Headline Prediction | 89.58 | 95.52 | 95.87 |
Wikipedia Section Title Prediction | 73.66 | 66.33 | 73.31 |
Cloze-style multiple-choice QA | 39.16 | 27.98 | 41.87 |
Article Genre Classification | 90.63 | 97.03 | 97.34 |
Named Entity Recognition (F1-score) | 73.24 | 65.93 | 64.47 |
Cross-Lingual Sentence Retrieval Task | 21.46 | 13.74 | 27.12 |
Average | 64.62 | 61.09 | 66.66 |
Task | Task Type | mBERT | XLM-R | IndicBERT |
---|---|---|---|---|
BBC News Classification | Genre Classification | 60.55 | 75.52 | 74.60 |
IIT Product Reviews | Sentiment Analysis | 74.57 | 78.97 | 71.32 |
IITP Movie Reviews | Sentiment Analaysis | 56.77 | 61.61 | 59.03 |
Soham News Article | Genre Classification | 80.23 | 87.6 | 78.45 |
Midas Discourse | Discourse Analysis | 71.20 | 79.94 | 78.44 |
iNLTK Headlines Classification | Genre Classification | 87.95 | 93.38 | 94.52 |
ACTSA Sentiment Analysis | Sentiment Analysis | 48.53 | 59.33 | 61.18 |
Winograd NLI | Natural Language Inference | 56.34 | 55.87 | 56.34 |
Choice of Plausible Alternative (COPA) | Natural Language Inference | 54.92 | 51.13 | 58.33 |
Amrita Exact Paraphrase | Paraphrase Detection | 93.81 | 93.02 | 93.75 |
Amrita Rough Paraphrase | Paraphrase Detection | 83.38 | 82.20 | 84.33 |
Average | 69.84 | 74.42 | 73.66 |
* Note: all models have been restricted to a max_seq_length of 128.
The model can be downloaded here . Both tf checkpoints and pytorch binaries are included in the archive. Alternatively, you can also download it from Huggingface .
If you are using any of the resources, please cite the following article:
@inproceedings{kakwani2020indicnlpsuite, title={{IndicNLPSuite: Monolingual Corpora, Evaluation Benchmarks and Pre-trained Multilingual Language Models for Indian Languages}}, author={Divyanshu Kakwani and Anoop Kunchukuttan and Satish Golla and Gokul N.C. and Avik Bhattacharyya and Mitesh M. Khapra and Pratyush Kumar}, year={2020}, booktitle={Findings of EMNLP}, }
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The IndicBERT code (and models) are released under the MIT License.
This work is the outcome of a volunteer effort as part of AI4Bharat initiative .