AfroLM: A Self-Active Learning-based Multilingual Pretrained Language Model for 23 African Languages

Bonaventure F. P. Dossou, Atnafu Lambebo Tonja, Oreen Yousuf, Salomey Osei, Abigail Oppong, Iyanuoluwa Shode, Oluwabusayo Olufunke Awoyomi, Chris Emezue


Abstract
In recent years, multilingual pre-trained language models have gained prominence due to their remarkable performance on numerous downstream Natural Language Processing tasks (NLP). However, pre-training these large multilingual language models requires a lot of training data, which is not available for African Languages. Active learning is a semi-supervised learning algorithm, in which a model consistently and dynamically learns to identify the most beneficial samples to train itself on, in order to achieve better optimization and performance on downstream tasks. Furthermore, active learning effectively and practically addresses real-world data scarcity. Despite all its benefits, active learning, in the context of NLP and especially multilingual language models pretraining, has received little consideration. In this paper, we present AfroLM, a multilingual language model pretrained from scratch on 23 African languages (the largest effort to date) using our novel self-active learning framework. Pretrained on a dataset significantly (14x) smaller than existing baselines, AfroLM outperforms many multilingual pretrained language models (AfriBERTa, XLMR-base, mBERT) on various NLP downstream tasks (NER, text classification, and sentiment analysis). Additional out-of-domain sentiment analysis experiments show that AfroLM is able to generalize well across various domains. We release the code source, and our datasets used in our framework at https://github.com/bonaventuredossou/MLM_AL.
Anthology ID:
2022.sustainlp-1.11
Original:
2022.sustainlp-1.11v1
Version 2:
2022.sustainlp-1.11v2
Volume:
Proceedings of The Third Workshop on Simple and Efficient Natural Language Processing (SustaiNLP)
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December
Year:
2022
Address:
Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates (Hybrid)
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sustainlp
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Association for Computational Linguistics
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Pages:
52–64
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URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.sustainlp-1.11
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Cite (ACL):
Bonaventure F. P. Dossou, Atnafu Lambebo Tonja, Oreen Yousuf, Salomey Osei, Abigail Oppong, Iyanuoluwa Shode, Oluwabusayo Olufunke Awoyomi, and Chris Emezue. 2022. AfroLM: A Self-Active Learning-based Multilingual Pretrained Language Model for 23 African Languages. In Proceedings of The Third Workshop on Simple and Efficient Natural Language Processing (SustaiNLP), pages 52–64, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates (Hybrid). Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
AfroLM: A Self-Active Learning-based Multilingual Pretrained Language Model for 23 African Languages (Dossou et al., sustainlp 2022)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-script-update/2022.sustainlp-1.11.pdf