Papers › An Empirical Study of Pre-trained Transformers for Arabic Information Extraction

An Empirical Study of Pre-trained Transformers for Arabic Information Extraction

30 Apr 2020EMNLP 2020 11arXiv:2004.14519archive 2025-07-28

Wuwei Lan, Yang Chen, Wei Xu, Alan Ritter

Multilingual pre-trained Transformers, such as mBERT (Devlin et al., 2019) and XLM-RoBERTa (Conneau et al., 2020a), have been shown to enable the effective cross-lingual zero-shot transfer. However, their performance on Arabic information extraction (IE) tasks is not very well studied. In this paper, we pre-train a customized bilingual BERT, dubbed GigaBERT, that is designed specifically for Arabic NLP and English-to-Arabic zero-shot transfer learning. We study GigaBERT's effectiveness on zero-short transfer across four IE tasks: named entity recognition, part-of-speech tagging, argument role labeling, and relation extraction. Our best model significantly outperforms mBERT, XLM-RoBERTa, and AraBERT (Antoun et al., 2020) in both the supervised and zero-shot transfer settings. We have made our pre-trained models publicly available at https://github.com/lanwuwei/GigaBERT.

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Tasks

Cross-Lingual TransferLanguage ModellingNamed Entity RecognitionNamed Entity Recognition (NER)Natural Language InferencePart-Of-Speech TaggingQuestion AnsweringRelation ExtractionSentiment AnalysisTransfer LearningZero-Shot Learningnamed-entity-recognition

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Methods

AdamAttentionAttention DropoutBERTDense ConnectionsDropoutLayer NormalizationLinear LayerLinear Warmup With Linear DecayMulti-Head AttentionResidual ConnectionSoftmaxWeight DecayWordPiecemBERT

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