English

RUBERT: A Bilingual Roman Urdu BERT Using Cross Lingual Transfer Learning

Computation and Language 2021-02-24 v1

Abstract

In recent studies, it has been shown that Multilingual language models underperform their monolingual counterparts. It is also a well-known fact that training and maintaining monolingual models for each language is a costly and time-consuming process. Roman Urdu is a resource-starved language used popularly on social media platforms and chat apps. In this research, we propose a novel dataset of scraped tweets containing 54M tokens and 3M sentences. Additionally, we also propose RUBERT a bilingual Roman Urdu model created by additional pretraining of English BERT. We compare its performance with a monolingual Roman Urdu BERT trained from scratch and a multilingual Roman Urdu BERT created by additional pretraining of Multilingual BERT. We show through our experiments that additional pretraining of the English BERT produces the most notable performance improvement.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2102.11278,
  title  = {RUBERT: A Bilingual Roman Urdu BERT Using Cross Lingual Transfer Learning},
  author = {Usama Khalid and Mirza Omer Beg and Muhammad Umair Arshad},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2102.11278},
  year   = {2021}
}

Comments

arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:2102.10958

R2 v1 2026-06-23T23:24:56.443Z