MARBERT

**MARBERT** is one of three models described in our **ACL 2021 paper** **"ARBERT & MARBERT: Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Arabic"**. MARBERT is a large-scale pre-trained masked language model focused on both Dialectal Arabic (DA) and MSA. Arabic has multiple varieties. To train MARBERT, we randomly sample 1B Arabic tweets from a large in-house dataset of about 6B tweets. We only include tweets with at least 3 Arabic words, based on character string matching, regardless whether the tweet has non-Arabic string or not. That is, we do not remove non-Arabic so long as the tweet meets the 3 Arabic word criterion. The dataset makes up **128GB of text** (**15.6B tokens**). We use the same network architecture as ARBERT (BERT-base), but without the next sentence prediction (NSP) objective since tweets are short. See our repo for modifying BERT code to remove NSP. For more information about MARBERT, please visit our own GitHub repo. If you use our models (ARBERT, MARBERT, or MARBERTv2) for your scientific publication, or if you find the resources in this repository useful, please cite our paper as follows (to be updated): We gratefully acknowledge support from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Canadian Foundation for Innovation, ComputeCanada and UBC ARC-Sockeye. We also thank the Google TensorFlow Research Cloud (TFRC) program for providing us with free TPU access.