Pre-training Data Quality and Quantity for a Low-Resource Language: New Corpus and BERT Models for Maltese

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new Maltese corpus and pre-trained BERT models, demonstrating that domain-diverse data and smaller corpora can significantly improve NLP task performance for low-resource languages.

Contribution

It presents a new Maltese corpus, two pre-trained BERT models, and analyzes the impact of data size and domain on low-resource language NLP performance.

Findings

Mixture of domains improves performance over Wikipedia-only data

Smaller corpora can still achieve significant performance gains

Monolingual BERT outperforms or matches mBERT on Maltese tasks

Abstract

Multilingual language models such as mBERT have seen impressive cross-lingual transfer to a variety of languages, but many languages remain excluded from these models. In this paper, we analyse the effect of pre-training with monolingual data for a low-resource language that is not included in mBERT -- Maltese -- with a range of pre-training set ups. We conduct evaluations with the newly pre-trained models on three morphosyntactic tasks -- dependency parsing, part-of-speech tagging, and named-entity recognition -- and one semantic classification task -- sentiment analysis. We also present a newly created corpus for Maltese, and determine the effect that the pre-training data size and domain have on the downstream performance. Our results show that using a mixture of pre-training domains is often superior to using Wikipedia text only. We also find that a fraction of this corpus is enough to make significant leaps in performance over Wikipedia-trained models. We pre-train and compare two models on the new corpus: a monolingual BERT model trained from scratch (BERTu), and a further pre-trained multilingual BERT (mBERTu). The models achieve state-of-the-art performance on these tasks, despite the new corpus being considerably smaller than typically used corpora for high-resourced languages. On average, BERTu outperforms or performs competitively with mBERTu, and the largest gains are observed for higher-level tasks.