Papers › Neural Language Models for Nineteenth-Century English

Neural Language Models for Nineteenth-Century English

24 May 2021arXiv:2105.11321archive 2025-07-28

Kasra Hosseini, Kaspar Beelen, Giovanni Colavizza, Mariona Coll Ardanuy

We present four types of neural language models trained on a large historical dataset of books in English, published between 1760-1900 and comprised of ~5.1 billion tokens. The language model architectures include static (word2vec and fastText) and contextualized models (BERT and Flair). For each architecture, we trained a model instance using the whole dataset. Additionally, we trained separate instances on text published before 1850 for the two static models, and four instances considering different time slices for BERT. Our models have already been used in various downstream tasks where they consistently improved performance. In this paper, we describe how the models have been created and outline their reuse potential.

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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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