# BERTweet: A pre-trained language model for English Tweets
- BERTweet is the first public large-scale language model pre-trained for English Tweets. BERTweet is trained based on the [RoBERTa](https://github.com/pytorch/fairseq/blob/master/examples/roberta/README.md) pre-training procedure, using the same model configuration as [BERT-base](https://github.com/google-research/bert).
- The corpus used to pre-train BERTweet consists of 850M English Tweets (16B word tokens ~ 80GB), containing 845M Tweets streamed from 01/2012 to 08/2019 and 5M Tweets related to the **COVID-19** pandemic.
- BERTweet does better than its competitors RoBERTa-base and [XLM-R-base](https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.02116) and outperforms previous state-of-the-art models on three downstream Tweet NLP tasks of Part-of-speech tagging, Named entity recognition and text classification.
The general architecture and experimental results of BERTweet can be found in our [paper](https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.10200):
@inproceedings{bertweet,
title = {{BERTweet: A pre-trained language model for English Tweets}},
author = {Dat Quoc Nguyen and Thanh Vu and Anh Tuan Nguyen},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations},
year = {2020}
}
**Please CITE** our paper when BERTweet is used to help produce published results or is incorporated into other software.
For further information or requests, please go to [BERTweet's homepage](https://github.com/VinAIResearch/BERTweet)!
### Installation
- Python 3.6+, and PyTorch 1.1.0+ (or TensorFlow 2.0+)
- Install `transformers`:
- `git clone https://github.com/huggingface/transformers.git`
- `cd transformers`
- `pip3 install --upgrade .`
- Install `emoji`: `pip3 install emoji`
### Pre-trained models
Model | #params | Arch. | Pre-training data
---|---|---|---
`vinai/bertweet-base` | 135M | base | 845M English Tweets (cased)
`vinai/bertweet-covid19-base-cased` | 135M | base | 23M COVID-19 English Tweets (cased)
`vinai/bertweet-covid19-base-uncased` | 135M | base | 23M COVID-19 English Tweets (uncased)
Two pre-trained models `vinai/bertweet-covid19-base-cased` and `vinai/bertweet-covid19-base-uncased` are resulted by further pre-training the pre-trained model `vinai/bertweet-base` on a corpus of 23M COVID-19 English Tweets for 40 epochs.
### Example usage
```python
import torch
from transformers import AutoModel, AutoTokenizer
bertweet = AutoModel.from_pretrained("vinai/bertweet-base")
tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained("vinai/bertweet-base")
# INPUT TWEET IS ALREADY NORMALIZED!
line = "SC has first two presumptive cases of coronavirus , DHEC confirms HTTPURL via @USER :cry:"
input_ids = torch.tensor([tokenizer.encode(line)])
with torch.no_grad():
features = bertweet(input_ids) # Models outputs are now tuples
## With TensorFlow 2.0+:
# from transformers import TFAutoModel
# bertweet = TFAutoModel.from_pretrained("vinai/bertweet-base")
```
### Normalize raw input Tweets
Before applying `fastBPE` to the pre-training corpus of 850M English Tweets, we tokenized these Tweets using `TweetTokenizer` from the NLTK toolkit and used the `emoji` package to translate emotion icons into text strings (here, each icon is referred to as a word token). We also normalized the Tweets by converting user mentions and web/url links into special tokens `@USER` and `HTTPURL`, respectively. Thus it is recommended to also apply the same pre-processing step for BERTweet-based downstream applications w.r.t. the raw input Tweets. BERTweet provides this pre-processing step by enabling the `normalization` argument.
```python
import torch
from transformers import AutoTokenizer
# Load the AutoTokenizer with a normalization mode if the input Tweet is raw
tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained("vinai/bertweet-base", normalization=True)
# from transformers import BertweetTokenizer
# tokenizer = BertweetTokenizer.from_pretrained("vinai/bertweet-base", normalization=True)
line = "SC has first two presumptive cases of coronavirus, DHEC confirms https://postandcourier.com/health/covid19/sc-has-first-two-presumptive-cases-of-coronavirus-dhec-confirms/article_bddfe4ae-5fd3-11ea-9ce4-5f495366cee6.html?utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter&utm_campaign=user-share… via @postandcourier"
input_ids = torch.tensor([tokenizer.encode(line)])
```