Table of contents

1. Introduction
2. Using PhoBERT with transformers
   • Installation
   • Pre-trained models
   • Example usage
3. Using PhoBERT with fairseq
4. Notes

PhoBERT: Pre-trained language models for Vietnamese

Pre-trained PhoBERT models are the state-of-the-art language models for Vietnamese (Pho, i.e. "Phở", is a popular food in Vietnam):

• Two PhoBERT versions of "base" and "large" are the first public large-scale monolingual language models pre-trained for Vietnamese. PhoBERT pre-training approach is based on RoBERTa which optimizes the BERT pre-training procedure for more robust performance.
• PhoBERT outperforms previous monolingual and multilingual approaches, obtaining new state-of-the-art performances on four downstream Vietnamese NLP tasks of Part-of-speech tagging, Dependency parsing, Named-entity recognition and Natural language inference.

The general architecture and experimental results of PhoBERT can be found in our paper:

@inproceedings{phobert,
title     = {{PhoBERT: Pre-trained language models for Vietnamese}},
author    = {Dat Quoc Nguyen and Anh Tuan Nguyen},
booktitle = {Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2020},
year      = {2020},
pages     = {1037--1042}
}

Please CITE our paper when PhoBERT is used to help produce published results or is incorporated into other software.

Using PhoBERT with transformers

Installation

• Install transformers with pip: pip install transformers, or install transformers from source.
  Note that we merged a slow tokenizer for PhoBERT into the main transformers branch. The process of merging a fast tokenizer for PhoBERT is in the discussion, as mentioned in this pull request. If users would like to utilize the fast tokenizer, the users might install transformers as follows:

git clone --single-branch --branch fast_tokenizers_BARTpho_PhoBERT_BERTweet https://github.com/datquocnguyen/transformers.git
cd transformers
pip3 install -e .

• Install tokenizers with pip: pip3 install tokenizers

Pre-trained models

Model	#params	Arch.	Max length	Pre-training data	License
vinai/phobert-base-v2	135M	base	256	20GB of Wikipedia and News texts + 120GB of texts from OSCAR-2301	GNU Affero GPL v3
vinai/phobert-base	135M	base	256	20GB of Wikipedia and News texts	MIT License
vinai/phobert-large	370M	large	256	20GB of Wikipedia and News texts	MIT License

Example usage

import torch
from transformers import AutoModel, AutoTokenizer

phobert = AutoModel.from_pretrained("vinai/phobert-base-v2")
tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained("vinai/phobert-base-v2")

# INPUT TEXT MUST BE ALREADY WORD-SEGMENTED!
sentence = 'Chúng_tôi là những nghiên_cứu_viên .'  

input_ids = torch.tensor([tokenizer.encode(sentence)])

with torch.no_grad():
    features = phobert(input_ids)  # Models outputs are now tuples

## With TensorFlow 2.0+:
# from transformers import TFAutoModel
# phobert = TFAutoModel.from_pretrained("vinai/phobert-base")

Using PhoBERT with fairseq

Please see details at HERE!

Notes

In case the input texts are raw, i.e. without word segmentation, a word segmenter must be applied to produce word-segmented texts before feeding to PhoBERT. As PhoBERT employed the RDRSegmenter from VnCoreNLP to pre-process the pre-training data (including Vietnamese tone normalization and word and sentence segmentation), it is recommended to also use the same word segmenter for PhoBERT-based downstream applications w.r.t. the input raw texts.

Installation

pip install py_vncorenlp

Example usage

import py_vncorenlp

# Automatically download VnCoreNLP components from the original repository
# and save them in some local machine folder
py_vncorenlp.download_model(save_dir='/absolute/path/to/vncorenlp')

# Load the word and sentence segmentation component
rdrsegmenter = py_vncorenlp.VnCoreNLP(annotators=["wseg"], save_dir='/absolute/path/to/vncorenlp')

text = "Ông Nguyễn Khắc Chúc  đang làm việc tại Đại học Quốc gia Hà Nội. Bà Lan, vợ ông Chúc, cũng làm việc tại đây."

output = rdrsegmenter.word_segment(text)

print(output)
# ['Ông Nguyễn_Khắc_Chúc đang làm_việc tại Đại_học Quốc_gia Hà_Nội .', 'Bà Lan , vợ ông Chúc , cũng làm_việc tại đây .']