arXiv Computation and Language By Hafsteinn Einarsson

Beyond IceBERT: Open-Data ModernBERT Encoders for Icelandic from 12M to 1B Parameters

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The paper presents a series of Icelandic language encoders built with the ModernBERT architecture, ranging from 12 million to 1 billion parameters, trained on 9 billion tokens of open data. It reexamines IceBERT’s findings, showing that a cleaned web crawl suffices for strong performance and that starting from a multilingual model can aid certain tasks. The 1 billion‑parameter model, trained from scratch, outperforms IceBERT on all eleven benchmark tasks, and when warm‑started from the English Ettin encoder it achieves the best scores across all evaluated tasks.

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