CamemBERT 2.0: A Smarter French Language Model Aged to Perfection

TL;DR

This paper introduces CamemBERT 2.0, two updated French language models designed to combat concept drift by utilizing larger datasets, improved architectures, and tokenization, significantly enhancing performance across general and domain-specific NLP tasks.

Contribution

The paper presents two new versions of CamemBERT, based on DeBERTaV3 and RoBERTa architectures, trained on larger, more recent data with improved tokenization, addressing concept drift in French NLP models.

Findings

Models outperform previous versions on NLP benchmarks.

Enhanced performance in medical and general-domain tasks.

Openly available on Huggingface for community use.

Abstract

French language models, such as CamemBERT, have been widely adopted across industries for natural language processing (NLP) tasks, with models like CamemBERT seeing over 4 million downloads per month. However, these models face challenges due to temporal concept drift, where outdated training data leads to a decline in performance, especially when encountering new topics and terminology. This issue emphasizes the need for updated models that reflect current linguistic trends. In this paper, we introduce two new versions of the CamemBERT base model-CamemBERTav2 and CamemBERTv2-designed to address these challenges. CamemBERTav2 is based on the DeBERTaV3 architecture and makes use of the Replaced Token Detection (RTD) objective for better contextual understanding, while CamemBERTv2 is built on RoBERTa, which uses the Masked Language Modeling (MLM) objective. Both models are trained on a significantly larger and more recent dataset with longer context length and an updated tokenizer that enhances tokenization performance for French. We evaluate the performance of these models on both general-domain NLP tasks and domain-specific applications, such as medical field tasks, demonstrating their versatility and effectiveness across a range of use cases. Our results show that these updated models vastly outperform their predecessors, making them valuable tools for modern NLP systems. All our new models, as well as intermediate checkpoints, are made openly available on Huggingface.