BERT Multilingual Base Model (Cased)
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Parameter Count | 179M |
| License | Apache 2.0 |
| Training Data | Wikipedia (104 languages) |
| Paper | Original BERT Paper |
What is bert-base-multilingual-cased?
BERT-base-multilingual-cased is a powerful transformer-based language model trained on Wikipedia data from 104 different languages. This case-sensitive model represents a significant achievement in multilingual natural language processing, capable of understanding and processing text across diverse linguistic contexts.
Implementation Details
The model utilizes a masked language modeling (MLM) approach and next sentence prediction (NSP) for pre-training. It employs WordPiece tokenization with a shared vocabulary size of 110,000 tokens, and implements special handling for languages like Chinese, Japanese, and Korean through CJK Unicode blocking.
- Pre-training uses masked language modeling with 15% token masking
- Implements bidirectional context understanding
- Handles sentence pairs with [CLS] and [SEP] tokens
- Supports sequences up to 512 tokens in length
Core Capabilities
- Multilingual text understanding and processing
- Fill-mask prediction tasks
- Feature extraction for downstream tasks
- Cross-lingual transfer learning
- Sequence classification and token classification
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: What makes this model unique?
This model's ability to handle 104 languages simultaneously while maintaining high performance makes it unique. It uses intelligent sampling techniques during training, under-sampling high-resource languages and over-sampling low-resource ones to maintain balance.
Q: What are the recommended use cases?
The model excels in tasks requiring whole-sentence understanding, including sequence classification, token classification, and question answering. It's particularly valuable for multilingual applications and cross-lingual transfer learning scenarios.
