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arXiv · 2305.06721

Advancing Neural Encoding of Portuguese with Transformer Albertina PT-*

João Rodrigues·Luís Gomes·João Silva·António Branco·Rodrigo Santos·Henrique Lopes Cardoso·Tomás Osório
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Abstract

To advance the neural encoding of Portuguese (PT), and a fortiori the technological preparation of this language for the digital age, we developed a Transformer-based foundation model that sets a new state of the art in this respect for two of its variants, namely European Portuguese from Portugal (PT-PT) and American Portuguese from Brazil (PT-BR). To develop this encoder, which we named Albertina PT-*, a strong model was used as a starting point, DeBERTa, and its pre-training was done over data sets of Portuguese, namely over data sets we gathered for PT-PT and PT-BR, and over the brWaC corpus for PT-BR. The performance of Albertina and competing models was assessed by evaluating them on prominent downstream language processing tasks adapted for Portuguese. Both Albertina PT-PT and PT-BR versions are distributed free of charge and under the most permissive license possible and can be run on consumer-grade hardware, thus seeking to contribute to the advancement of research and innovation in language technology for Portuguese.

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João Rodrigues, Luís Gomes, João Silva, António Branco, Rodrigo Santos, Henrique Lopes Cardoso, Tomás Osório. 2023-05-11. Advancing Neural Encoding of Portuguese with Transformer Albertina PT-*. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-49008-8_35

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