Papers › Training Multilingual Pre-trained Language Model with Byte-level Subwords

Training Multilingual Pre-trained Language Model with Byte-level Subwords

23 Jan 2021arXiv:2101.09469archive 2025-07-28

Junqiu Wei, Qun Liu, Yinpeng Guo, Xin Jiang

The pre-trained language models have achieved great successes in various natural language understanding (NLU) tasks due to its capacity to capture the deep contextualized information in text by pre-training on large-scale corpora. One of the fundamental components in pre-trained language models is the vocabulary, especially for training multilingual models on many different languages. In the technical report, we present our practices on training multilingual pre-trained language models with BBPE: Byte-Level BPE (i.e., Byte Pair Encoding). In the experiment, we adopted the architecture of NEZHA as the underlying pre-trained language model and the results show that NEZHA trained with byte-level subwords consistently outperforms Google multilingual BERT and vanilla NEZHA by a notable margin in several multilingual NLU tasks. We release the source code of our byte-level vocabulary building tools and the multilingual pre-trained language models.

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huawei-noah/Pretrained-Language-Model officialmentioned in papertf report

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Language ModelingLanguage ModellingNatural Language Understanding

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

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