Papers › JuriBERT: A Masked-Language Model Adaptation for French Legal Text

JuriBERT: A Masked-Language Model Adaptation for French Legal Text

4 Oct 2021EMNLP (NLLP) 2021 11arXiv:2110.01485archive 2025-07-28

Stella Douka, Hadi Abdine, Michalis Vazirgiannis, Rajaa El Hamdani, David Restrepo Amariles

Language models have proven to be very useful when adapted to specific domains. Nonetheless, little research has been done on the adaptation of domain-specific BERT models in the French language. In this paper, we focus on creating a language model adapted to French legal text with the goal of helping law professionals. We conclude that some specific tasks do not benefit from generic language models pre-trained on large amounts of data. We explore the use of smaller architectures in domain-specific sub-languages and their benefits for French legal text. We prove that domain-specific pre-trained models can perform better than their equivalent generalised ones in the legal domain. Finally, we release JuriBERT, a new set of BERT models adapted to the French legal domain.

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stelladk/PretrainingBERT mentioned on GitHubpytorch report

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Language ModelingLanguage Modelling

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

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