AfroLM: A Self-Active Learning-based Multilingual Pretrained Language Model for 23 African Languages
This repository contains the model for our paper AfroLM: A Self-Active Learning-based Multilingual Pretrained Language Model for 23 African Languages which will appear at the Third Simple and Efficient Natural Language Processing, at EMNLP 2022.
Our self-active learning framework
Languages Covered
AfroLM has been pretrained from scratch on 23 African Languages: Amharic, Afan Oromo, Bambara, Ghomalá, Éwé, Fon, Hausa, Ìgbò, Kinyarwanda, Lingala, Luganda, Luo, Mooré, Chewa, Naija, Shona, Swahili, Setswana, Twi, Wolof, Xhosa, Yorùbá, and Zulu.
Evaluation Results
AfroLM was evaluated on MasakhaNER1.0 (10 African Languages) and MasakhaNER2.0 (21 African Languages) datasets; on text classification and sentiment analysis. AfroLM outperformed AfriBERTa, mBERT, and XLMR-base, and was very competitive with AfroXLMR. AfroLM is also very data efficient because it was pretrained on a dataset 14x+ smaller than its competitors' datasets. Below is the average of performance of various models, across various datasets. Please consult our paper for more language-level performance.
| Model | MasakhaNER | MasakhaNER2.0* | Text Classification (Yoruba/Hausa) | Sentiment Analysis (YOSM) | OOD Sentiment Analysis (Twitter -> YOSM) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
AfroLM-Large |
80.13 | 83.26 | 82.90/91.00 | 85.40 | 68.70 |
AfriBERTa |
79.10 | 81.31 | 83.22/90.86 | 82.70 | 65.90 |
mBERT |
71.55 | 80.68 | --- | --- | --- |
XLMR-base |
79.16 | 83.09 | --- | --- | --- |
AfroXLMR-base |
81.90 |
84.55 |
--- | --- | --- |
- (*) The evaluation was made on the 11 additional languages of the dataset.
Pretrained Models and Dataset
Models:: AfroLM-Large and Dataset: AfroLM Dataset
Reproducing our result: Training and Evaluation
- To train the network, run
python active_learning.py. You can also wrap it around abashscript. - For the evaluation:
- NER Classification:
bash ner_experiments.sh - Text Classification & Sentiment Analysis:
bash text_classification_all.sh
- NER Classification:
Citation
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