LuxemBERT: Simple and Practical Data Augmentation in Language Model Pre-Training for Luxembourgish
Cedric Lothritz, Bertrand Lebichot, Kevin Allix, Lisa Veiber, Tegawende Bissyande, Jacques Klein, Andrey Boytsov, Clément Lefebvre, Anne Goujon
Abstract
Pre-trained Language Models such as BERT have become ubiquitous in NLP where they have achieved state-of-the-art performance in most NLP tasks. While these models are readily available for English and other widely spoken languages, they remain scarce for low-resource languages such as Luxembourgish. In this paper, we present LuxemBERT, a BERT model for the Luxembourgish language that we create using the following approach: we augment the pre-training dataset by considering text data from a closely related language that we partially translate using a simple and straightforward method. We are then able to produce the LuxemBERT model, which we show to be effective for various NLP tasks: it outperforms a simple baseline built with the available Luxembourgish text data as well the multilingual mBERT model, which is currently the only option for transformer-based language models in Luxembourgish. Furthermore, we present datasets for various downstream NLP tasks that we created for this study and will make available to researchers on request.- Anthology ID:
- 2022.lrec-1.543
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
- Month:
- June
- Year:
- 2022
- Address:
- Marseille, France
- Editors:
- Nicoletta Calzolari, Frédéric Béchet, Philippe Blache, Khalid Choukri, Christopher Cieri, Thierry Declerck, Sara Goggi, Hitoshi Isahara, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Hélène Mazo, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
- Venue:
- LREC
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- European Language Resources Association
- Note:
- Pages:
- 5080–5089
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2022.lrec-1.543
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Cedric Lothritz, Bertrand Lebichot, Kevin Allix, Lisa Veiber, Tegawende Bissyande, Jacques Klein, Andrey Boytsov, Clément Lefebvre, and Anne Goujon. 2022. LuxemBERT: Simple and Practical Data Augmentation in Language Model Pre-Training for Luxembourgish. In Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 5080–5089, Marseille, France. European Language Resources Association.
- Cite (Informal):
- LuxemBERT: Simple and Practical Data Augmentation in Language Model Pre-Training for Luxembourgish (Lothritz et al., LREC 2022)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl-2023-videos/2022.lrec-1.543.pdf