English

ManufactuBERT: Efficient Continual Pretraining for Manufacturing

Computation and Language 2025-11-10 v1

Abstract

While large general-purpose Transformer-based encoders excel at general language understanding, their performance diminishes in specialized domains like manufacturing due to a lack of exposure to domain-specific terminology and semantics. In this paper, we address this gap by introducing ManufactuBERT, a RoBERTa model continually pretrained on a large-scale corpus curated for the manufacturing domain. We present a comprehensive data processing pipeline to create this corpus from web data, involving an initial domain-specific filtering step followed by a multi-stage deduplication process that removes redundancies. Our experiments show that ManufactuBERT establishes a new state-of-the-art on a range of manufacturing-related NLP tasks, outperforming strong specialized baselines. More importantly, we demonstrate that training on our carefully deduplicated corpus significantly accelerates convergence, leading to a 33\% reduction in training time and computational cost compared to training on the non-deduplicated dataset. The proposed pipeline offers a reproducible example for developing high-performing encoders in other specialized domains. We will release our model and curated corpus at https://huggingface.co/cea-list-ia.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2511.05135,
  title  = {ManufactuBERT: Efficient Continual Pretraining for Manufacturing},
  author = {Robin Armingaud and Romaric Besançon},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2511.05135},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

Submitted to LREC 2026

R2 v1 2026-07-01T07:25:56.163Z