Abstract
Inductive transfer learning has taken the entire NLP field by storm, with models such as BERT and BART setting new state of the art on countless NLU tasks. However, most of the available models and research have been conducted for English. In this work, we introduce BARThez, the first large-scale pretrained seq2seq model for French. Being based on BART, BARThez is particularly well-suited for generative tasks. We evaluate BARThez on five discriminative tasks from the FLUE benchmark and two generative tasks from a novel summarization dataset, OrangeSum, that we created for this research. We show BARThez to be very competitive with state-of-the-art BERT-based French language models such as CamemBERT and FlauBERT. We also continue the pretraining of a multilingual BART on BARThez’ corpus, and show our resulting model, mBARThez, to significantly boost BARThez’ generative performance.- Anthology ID:
- 2021.emnlp-main.740
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
- Month:
- November
- Year:
- 2021
- Address:
- Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic
- Editors:
- Marie-Francine Moens, Xuanjing Huang, Lucia Specia, Scott Wen-tau Yih
- Venue:
- EMNLP
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 9369–9390
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.740
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2021.emnlp-main.740
- Cite (ACL):
- Moussa Kamal Eddine, Antoine Tixier, and Michalis Vazirgiannis. 2021. BARThez: a Skilled Pretrained French Sequence-to-Sequence Model. In Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 9369–9390, Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- BARThez: a Skilled Pretrained French Sequence-to-Sequence Model (Kamal Eddine et al., EMNLP 2021)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-1/2021.emnlp-main.740.pdf
- Code
- moussaKam/BARThez + additional community code
- Data
- OrangeSum, FLUE, GLUE