arXiv Computation and Language By Iffat Maab, Waleed Jamil, Raphael Schmitt

DunbaaBERT: From Sacrifice to Semantics

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DunbaaBERT is a family of Urdu RoBERTa-base models trained from scratch on a 17 GB deduplicated Urdu corpus, using Byte‑BPE vocabularies of 32k, 52k, and 96k tokens. The models are evaluated on intrinsic and downstream Urdu NLP tasks—including linguistic acceptability, news classification, offensive language detection, and sentiment analysis—showing competitive performance against strong multilingual baselines while maintaining favorable efficiency trade‑offs. The study finds that larger vocabularies do not consistently improve downstream effectiveness, with the 32k variant often delivering the best overall efficiency profile.

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