---
language:
- ar
license: apache-2.0
widget:
- text: "الهدف من الحياة هو [MASK] ."
---
# CAMeLBERT: A collection of pre-trained models for Arabic NLP tasks
## Model description
**CAMeLBERT** is a collection of BERT models pre-trained on Arabic texts with different sizes and variants.
We release pre-trained language models for Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), dialectal Arabic (DA), and classical Arabic (CA), in addition to a model pre-trained on a mix of the three.
We also provide additional models that are pre-trained on a scaled-down set of the MSA variant (half, quarter, eighth, and sixteenth).
The details are described in the paper *"[The Interplay of Variant, Size, and Task Type in Arabic Pre-trained Language Models](https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.06678)."*
This model card describes **CAMeLBERT-Mix** (`bert-base-camelbert-mix`), a model pre-trained on a mixture of these variants: MSA, DA, and CA.
||Model|Variant|Size|#Word|
|-|-|:-:|-:|-:|
|✔|`bert-base-camelbert-mix`|CA,DA,MSA|167GB|17.3B|
||`bert-base-camelbert-ca`|CA|6GB|847M|
||`bert-base-camelbert-da`|DA|54GB|5.8B|
||`bert-base-camelbert-msa`|MSA|107GB|12.6B|
||`bert-base-camelbert-msa-half`|MSA|53GB|6.3B|
||`bert-base-camelbert-msa-quarter`|MSA|27GB|3.1B|
||`bert-base-camelbert-msa-eighth`|MSA|14GB|1.6B|
||`bert-base-camelbert-msa-sixteenth`|MSA|6GB|746M|
## Intended uses
You can use the released model for either masked language modeling or next sentence prediction.
However, it is mostly intended to be fine-tuned on an NLP task, such as NER, POS tagging, sentiment analysis, dialect identification, and poetry classification.
We release our fine-tuninig code [here](https://github.com/CAMeL-Lab/CAMeLBERT).
#### How to use
You can use this model directly with a pipeline for masked language modeling:
```python
>>> from transformers import pipeline
>>> unmasker = pipeline('fill-mask', model='CAMeL-Lab/bert-base-camelbert-mix')
>>> unmasker("الهدف من الحياة هو [MASK] .")
[{'sequence': '[CLS] الهدف من الحياة هو النجاح. [SEP]',
'score': 0.10861027985811234,
'token': 6232,
'token_str': 'النجاح'},
{'sequence': '[CLS] الهدف من الحياة هو.. [SEP]',
'score': 0.07626965641975403,
'token': 18,
'token_str': '.'},
{'sequence': '[CLS] الهدف من الحياة هو الحياة. [SEP]',
'score': 0.05131986364722252,
'token': 3696,
'token_str': 'الحياة'},
{'sequence': '[CLS] الهدف من الحياة هو الموت. [SEP]',
'score': 0.03734956309199333,
'token': 4295,
'token_str': 'الموت'},
{'sequence': '[CLS] الهدف من الحياة هو العمل. [SEP]',
'score': 0.027189988642930984,
'token': 2854,
'token_str': 'العمل'}]
```
*Note*: to download our models, you would need `transformers>=3.5.0`. Otherwise, you could download the models manually.
Here is how to use this model to get the features of a given text in PyTorch:
```python
from transformers import AutoTokenizer, AutoModel
tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained('CAMeL-Lab/bert-base-camelbert-mix')
model = AutoModel.from_pretrained('CAMeL-Lab/bert-base-camelbert-mix')
text = "مرحبا يا عالم."
encoded_input = tokenizer(text, return_tensors='pt')
output = model(**encoded_input)
```
and in TensorFlow:
```python
from transformers import AutoTokenizer, TFAutoModel
tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained('CAMeL-Lab/bert-base-camelbert-mix')
model = TFAutoModel.from_pretrained('CAMeL-Lab/bert-base-camelbert-mix')
text = "مرحبا يا عالم."
encoded_input = tokenizer(text, return_tensors='tf')
output = model(encoded_input)
```
## Training data
- MSA (Modern Standard Arabic)
- [The Arabic Gigaword Fifth Edition](https://catalog.ldc.upenn.edu/LDC2011T11)
- [Abu El-Khair Corpus](http://www.abuelkhair.net/index.php/en/arabic/abu-el-khair-corpus)
- [OSIAN corpus](https://vlo.clarin.eu/search;jsessionid=31066390B2C9E8C6304845BA79869AC1?1&q=osian)
- [Arabic Wikipedia](https://archive.org/details/arwiki-20190201)
- The unshuffled version of the Arabic [OSCAR corpus](https://oscar-corpus.com/)
- DA (dialectal Arabic)
- A collection of dialectal Arabic data described in [our paper](https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.06678).
- CA (classical Arabic)
- [OpenITI (Version 2020.1.2)](https://zenodo.org/record/3891466#.YEX4-F0zbzc)
## Training procedure
We use [the original implementation](https://github.com/google-research/bert) released by Google for pre-training.
We follow the original English BERT model's hyperparameters for pre-training, unless otherwise specified.
### Preprocessing
- After extracting the raw text from each corpus, we apply the following pre-processing.
- We first remove invalid characters and normalize white spaces using the utilities provided by [the original BERT implementation](https://github.com/google-research/bert/blob/eedf5716ce1268e56f0a50264a88cafad334ac61/tokenization.py#L286-L297).
- We also remove lines without any Arabic characters.
- We then remove diacritics and kashida using [CAMeL Tools](https://github.com/CAMeL-Lab/camel_tools).
- Finally, we split each line into sentences with a heuristics-based sentence segmenter.
- We train a WordPiece tokenizer on the entire dataset (167 GB text) with a vocabulary size of 30,000 using [HuggingFace's tokenizers](https://github.com/huggingface/tokenizers).
- We do not lowercase letters nor strip accents.
### Pre-training
- The model was trained on a single cloud TPU (`v3-8`) for one million steps in total.
- The first 90,000 steps were trained with a batch size of 1,024 and the rest was trained with a batch size of 256.
- The sequence length was limited to 128 tokens for 90% of the steps and 512 for the remaining 10%.
- We use whole word masking and a duplicate factor of 10.
- We set max predictions per sequence to 20 for the dataset with max sequence length of 128 tokens and 80 for the dataset with max sequence length of 512 tokens.
- We use a random seed of 12345, masked language model probability of 0.15, and short sequence probability of 0.1.
- The optimizer used is Adam with a learning rate of 1e-4, \\(\beta_{1} = 0.9\\) and \\(\beta_{2} = 0.999\\), a weight decay of 0.01, learning rate warmup for 10,000 steps and linear decay of the learning rate after.
## Evaluation results
- We evaluate our pre-trained language models on five NLP tasks: NER, POS tagging, sentiment analysis, dialect identification, and poetry classification.
- We fine-tune and evaluate the models using 12 dataset.
- We used Hugging Face's transformers to fine-tune our CAMeLBERT models.
- We used transformers `v3.1.0` along with PyTorch `v1.5.1`.
- The fine-tuning was done by adding a fully connected linear layer to the last hidden state.
- We use \\(F_{1}\\) score as a metric for all tasks.
- Code used for fine-tuning is available [here](https://github.com/CAMeL-Lab/CAMeLBERT).
### Results
| Task | Dataset | Variant | Mix | CA | DA | MSA | MSA-1/2 | MSA-1/4 | MSA-1/8 | MSA-1/16 |
| -------------------- | --------------- | ------- | ----- | ----- | ----- | ----- | ------- | ------- | ------- | -------- |
| NER | ANERcorp | MSA | 80.2% | 66.2% | 74.2% | 82.4% | 82.3% | 82.0% | 82.3% | 80.5% |
| POS | PATB (MSA) | MSA | 97.3% | 96.6% | 96.5% | 97.4% | 97.4% | 97.4% | 97.4% | 97.4% |
| | ARZTB (EGY) | DA | 90.1% | 88.6% | 89.4% | 90.8% | 90.3% | 90.5% | 90.5% | 90.4% |
| | Gumar (GLF) | DA | 97.3% | 96.5% | 97.0% | 97.1% | 97.0% | 97.0% | 97.1% | 97.0% |
| SA | ASTD | MSA | 76.3% | 69.4% | 74.6% | 76.9% | 76.0% | 76.8% | 76.7% | 75.3% |
| | ArSAS | MSA | 92.7% | 89.4% | 91.8% | 93.0% | 92.6% | 92.5% | 92.5% | 92.3% |
| | SemEval | MSA | 69.0% | 58.5% | 68.4% | 72.1% | 70.7% | 72.8% | 71.6% | 71.2% |
| DID | MADAR-26 | DA | 62.9% | 61.9% | 61.8% | 62.6% | 62.0% | 62.8% | 62.0% | 62.2% |
| | MADAR-6 | DA | 92.5% | 91.5% | 92.2% | 91.9% | 91.8% | 92.2% | 92.1% | 92.0% |
| | MADAR-Twitter-5 | MSA | 75.7% | 71.4% | 74.2% | 77.6% | 78.5% | 77.3% | 77.7% | 76.2% |
| | NADI | DA | 24.7% | 17.3% | 20.1% | 24.9% | 24.6% | 24.6% | 24.9% | 23.8% |
| Poetry | APCD | CA | 79.8% | 80.9% | 79.6% | 79.7% | 79.9% | 80.0% | 79.7% | 79.8% |
### Results (Average)
| | Variant | Mix | CA | DA | MSA | MSA-1/2 | MSA-1/4 | MSA-1/8 | MSA-1/16 |
| -------------------- | ------- | ----- | ----- | ----- | ----- | ------- | ------- | ------- | -------- |
| Variant-wise-average[[1]](#footnote-1) | MSA | 81.9% | 75.3% | 79.9% | 83.2% | 82.9% | 83.1% | 83.0% | 82.1% |
| | DA | 73.5% | 71.1% | 72.1% | 73.5% | 73.1% | 73.4% | 73.3% | 73.1% |
| | CA | 79.8% | 80.9% | 79.6% | 79.7% | 79.9% | 80.0% | 79.7% | 79.8% |
| Macro-Average | ALL | 78.2% | 74.0% | 76.6% | 78.9% | 78.6% | 78.8% | 78.7% | 78.2% |
[1]: Variant-wise-average refers to average over a group of tasks in the same language variant.
## Acknowledgements
This research was supported with Cloud TPUs from Google’s TensorFlow Research Cloud (TFRC).
## Citation
```bibtex
@inproceedings{inoue-etal-2021-interplay,
title = "The Interplay of Variant, Size, and Task Type in {A}rabic Pre-trained Language Models",
author = "Inoue, Go and
Alhafni, Bashar and
Baimukan, Nurpeiis and
Bouamor, Houda and
Habash, Nizar",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the Sixth Arabic Natural Language Processing Workshop",
month = apr,
year = "2021",
address = "Kyiv, Ukraine (Online)",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
abstract = "In this paper, we explore the effects of language variants, data sizes, and fine-tuning task types in Arabic pre-trained language models. To do so, we build three pre-trained language models across three variants of Arabic: Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), dialectal Arabic, and classical Arabic, in addition to a fourth language model which is pre-trained on a mix of the three. We also examine the importance of pre-training data size by building additional models that are pre-trained on a scaled-down set of the MSA variant. We compare our different models to each other, as well as to eight publicly available models by fine-tuning them on five NLP tasks spanning 12 datasets. Our results suggest that the variant proximity of pre-training data to fine-tuning data is more important than the pre-training data size. We exploit this insight in defining an optimized system selection model for the studied tasks.",
}
```