bert-base-5lang-cased

This is a smaller version of bert-base-multilingual-cased that handles only 5 languages (en, fr, es, de and zh) instead of 104. The model is therefore 30% smaller than the original one (124M parameters instead of 178M) but gives exactly the same representations for the above cited languages. Starting from bert-base-5lang-cased will facilitate the deployment of your model on public cloud platforms while keeping similar results. For instance, Google Cloud Platform requires that the model size on disk should be lower than 500 MB for serveless deployments (Cloud Functions / Cloud ML) which is not the case of the original bert-base-multilingual-cased.

For more information about the models size, memory footprint and loading time please refer to the table below:

Model	Num parameters	Size	Memory	Loading time
bert-base-multilingual-cased	178 million	714 MB	1400 MB	4.2 sec
bert-base-5lang-cased	124 million	495 MB	950 MB	3.6 sec

These measurements have been computed on a Google Cloud n1-standard-1 machine (1 vCPU, 3.75 GB).

How to use

from transformers import AutoTokenizer, AutoModel

tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained("amine/bert-base-5lang-cased")
model = AutoModel.from_pretrained("amine/bert-base-5lang-cased")

How to cite

@inproceedings{smallermbert,
  title={Load What You Need: Smaller Versions of Multilingual BERT},
  author={Abdaoui, Amine and Pradel, Camille and Sigel, Grégoire},
  booktitle={SustaiNLP / EMNLP},
  year={2020}
}

Contact

Please contact amine@geotrend.fr for any question, feedback or request.