This is a repository of pretrained Japanese BERT models. The pretrained models are available along with the source code of pretraining.

Update (Dec. 15 2019): Our pretrained models are now included in Transformers by Hugging Face. You can use our models in the same way as other models in Transformers.

• All the models are trained on Japanese Wikipedia.
• We trained models with different tokenization algorithms.
  • mecab-ipadic-bpe-32k: texts are first tokenized with MeCab morphological parser and then split into subwords by WordPiece. The vocabulary size is 32000.
  • mecab-ipadic-char-4k: texts are first tokenized with MeCab and then split into characters (information of MeCab tokenization is preserved). The vocabulary size is 4000.
• All the models are trained with the same configuration as the original BERT; 512 tokens per instance, 256 instances per batch, and 1M training steps.
• We also distribute models trained with Whole Word Masking enabled; all of the tokens corresponding to a word (tokenized by MeCab) are masked at once.
• Along with the models, we provide tokenizers, which are compatible with ones defined in Transformers by Hugging Face.

• BERT-base models (12-layer, 768-hidden, 12-heads, 110M parameters)
  • BERT-base_mecab-ipadic-bpe-32k.tar.xz (2.1GB)
    • MeCab + WordPiece tokenization.
  • BERT-base_mecab-ipadic-bpe-32k_whole-word-mask.tar.xz (2.1GB)
    • MeCab + WordPiece tokenization. Whole Word Masking is enabled during training.
  • BERT-base_mecab-ipadic-char-4k.tar.xz (1.6GB)
    • Character tokenization.
  • BERT-base_mecab-ipadic-char-4k_whole-word-mask.tar.xz (1.6GB)
    • Character tokenization. Whole Word Masking is enabled during training (word boundaries are determined by MeCab).

All the model archives include following files. pytorch_model.bin and tf_model.h5 are compatible with Transformers.

.
├── config.json
├── model.ckpt.data-00000-of-00001
├── model.ckpt.index
├── model.ckpt.meta
├── pytorch_model.bin
├── tf_model.h5
└── vocab.txt

At present, only BERT-base models are available. We are planning to release BERT-large models in the future.

For just using the models:

• Transformers (>= 2.2.2)
• mecab-python3 with MeCab and its dictionary mecab-ipadic-2.7.0-20070801 installed

If you wish to pretrain a model:

• TensorFlow (== 1.14.0)
• SentencePiece
• logzero

Please refer to masked_lm_example.ipynb.

The all distributed models are pretrained on Japanese Wikipedia. To generate the corpus, WikiExtractor is used to extract plain texts from a Wikipedia dump file.

$ python WikiExtractor.py --output /path/to/corpus/dir --bytes 512M --compress --json --links --namespaces 0 --no_templates --min_text_length 16 --processes 20 jawiki-20190901-pages-articles-multistream.xml.bz2

Some preprocessing is applied to the extracted texts. Preprocessing includes splitting texts into sentences, removing noisy markups, etc.

Here we used mecab-ipadic-NEologd to handle proper nouns correctly (i.e. not to treat 。 in named entities such as モーニング娘。 and ゲスの極み乙女。 as sentence boundaries.)

$ seq -f %02g 0 8|xargs -L 1 -I {} -P 9 python make_corpus.py --input_file /path/to/corpus/dir/AA/wiki_{}.bz2 --output_file /path/to/corpus/dir/corpus.txt.{} --mecab_dict_path /path/to/neologd/dict/dir/

Same as the original BERT, we used byte-pair-encoding (BPE) to obtain subwords. We used a implementaion of BPE in SentencePiece.

# For mecab-ipadic-bpe-32k models
$ python build_vocab.py --input_file "/path/to/corpus/dir/corpus.txt.*" --output_file "/path/to/base/dir/vocab.txt" --subword_type bpe --vocab_size 32000

# For mecab-ipadic-char-4k models
$ python build_vocab.py --input_file "/path/to/corpus/dir/corpus.txt.*" --output_file "/path/to/base/dir/vocab.txt" --subword_type char --vocab_size 4000

With the vocabulary and text files above, we create dataset files for pretraining. Note that this process is highly memory-consuming and takes many hours.

# For mecab-ipadic-bpe-32k w/ whole word masking
# Note: each process will consume about 32GB RAM
$ seq -f %02g 0 8|xargs -L 1 -I {} -P 1 python create_pretraining_data.py --input_file /path/to/corpus/dir/corpus.txt.{} --output_file /path/to/base/dir/pretraining-data.tf_record.{} --do_whole_word_mask True --vocab_file /path/to/base/dir/vocab.txt --subword_type bpe --max_seq_length 512 --max_predictions_per_seq 80 --masked_lm_prob 0.15

# For mecab-ipadic-bpe-32k w/o whole word masking
# Note: each process will consume about 32GB RAM
$ seq -f %02g 0 8|xargs -L 1 -I {} -P 1 python create_pretraining_data.py --input_file /path/to/corpus/dir/corpus.txt.{} --output_file /path/to/base/dir/pretraining-data.tf_record.{} --vocab_file /path/to/base/dir/vocab.txt --subword_type bpe --max_seq_length 512 --max_predictions_per_seq 80 --masked_lm_prob 0.15

# For mecab-ipadic-char-4k w whole word masking
# Note: each process will consume about 45GB RAM
$ seq -f %02g 0 8|xargs -L 1 -I {} -P 1 python create_pretraining_data.py --input_file /path/to/corpus/dir/corpus.txt.{} --output_file /path/to/base/dir/pretraining-data.tf_record.{} --do_whole_word_mask True --vocab_file /path/to/base/dir/vocab.txt --subword_type char --max_seq_length 512 --max_predictions_per_seq 80 --masked_lm_prob 0.15

# For mecab-ipadic-char-4k w/o whole word masking
# Note: each process will consume about 45GB RAM
$ seq -f %02g 0 8|xargs -L 1 -I {} -P 1 python create_pretraining_data.py --input_file /path/to/corpus/dir/corpus.txt.{} --output_file /path/to/base/dir/pretraining-data.tf_record.{} --vocab_file /path/to/base/dir/vocab.txt --subword_type char --max_seq_length 512 --max_predictions_per_seq 80 --masked_lm_prob 0.15

We used Cloud TPUs to run pre-training.

For BERT-base models, v3-8 TPUs are used.

# For mecab-ipadic-bpe-32k BERT-base models
$ python3 run_pretraining.py \
--input_file="/path/to/pretraining-data.tf_record.*" \
--output_dir="/path/to/output_dir" \
--bert_config_file=bert_base_32k_config.json \
--max_seq_length=512 \
--max_predictions_per_seq=80 \
--do_train=True \
--train_batch_size=256 \
--num_train_steps=1000000 \
--learning_rate=1e-4 \
--save_checkpoints_steps=100000 \
--keep_checkpoint_max=10 \
--use_tpu=True \
--tpu_name=<tpu name> \
--num_tpu_cores=8

# For mecab-ipadic-char-4k BERT-base models
$ python3 run_pretraining.py \
--input_file="/path/to/pretraining-data.tf_record.*" \
--output_dir="/path/to/output_dir" \
--bert_config_file=bert_base_4k_config.json \
--max_seq_length=512 \
--max_predictions_per_seq=80 \
--do_train=True \
--train_batch_size=256 \
--num_train_steps=1000000 \
--learning_rate=1e-4 \
--save_checkpoints_steps=100000 \
--keep_checkpoint_max=10 \
--use_tpu=True \
--tpu_name=<tpu name> \
--num_tpu_cores=8

The pretrained models are distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0.

The codes in this repository are distributed under the MIT License.

• Original BERT model by Google Research Team
  • https://github.com/google-research/bert
  • https://github.com/tensorflow/models/tree/master/official/nlp/bert (for TensorFlow 2.0)
• Juman-tokenized Japanese BERT model
  • Author: Kurohashi-Kawahara Laboratory, Kyoto University
  • http://nlp.ist.i.kyoto-u.ac.jp/index.php?BERT日本語Pretrainedモデル
• MeCab-Jumandic-tokenized Japanese BERT model (trained with a large mini-batch size)
  • Author: National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT)
  • https://alaginrc.nict.go.jp/nict-bert/index.html
• Sentencepiece Japanese BERT model
  • Author: Yohei Kikuta
  • https://github.com/yoheikikuta/bert-japanese
• Sentencepiece Japanese BERT model, trained on SNS corpus
  • Author: Hottolink, Inc.
  • https://github.com/hottolink/hottoSNS-bert

For training models, we used Cloud TPUs provided by TensorFlow Research Cloud program.