README.md

---
license: apache-2.0
language:
- en
- yo
- ha
- ig
- pcm
---


# naija-bert-base

NaijaBERT was created by pre-training a [BERT model with token dropping](https://aclanthology.org/2022.acl-long.262/) on five Nigerian languages (English, Hausa, Igbo, Naija, and Yoruba) texts for about 100K steps. 
It was trained using BERT-base architecture with [Tensorflow Model Garden](https://github.com/tensorflow/models/tree/master/official/projects)

### Pre-training corpus
A mix of WURA, Wikipedia and MT560 data

#### How to use
You can use this model with Transformers *pipeline* for masked token prediction.
```python
>>> from transformers import pipeline
>>> unmasker = pipeline('fill-mask', model='Davlan/naija-bert-large')
>>> unmasker("Ọjọ kẹsan-an, [MASK] Kẹjọ ni wọn ri oku Baba")
```
```
[{'score': 0.9981744289398193, 'token': 3785, 'token_str': 'osu', 'sequence': 'ojo kesan - an, osu kejo ni won ri oku baba'}, {'score': 0.0015279919607564807, 'token': 3355, 'token_str': 'ojo', 'sequence': 'ojo kesan - an, ojo kejo ni won ri oku baba'}, {'score': 0.0001734074903652072, 'token': 11780, 'token_str': 'osun', 'sequence': 'ojo kesan - an, osun kejo ni won ri oku baba'}, {'score': 9.066923666978255e-05, 'token': 21579, 'token_str': 'oṣu', 'sequence': 'ojo kesan - an, oṣu kejo ni won ri oku baba'}, {'score': 1.816015355871059e-05, 'token': 3387, 'token_str': 'odun', 'sequence': 'ojo kesan - an, odun kejo ni won ri oku baba'}]
```

### Acknowledgment
We thank [@stefan-it](https://github.com/stefan-it) for providing the pre-processing and pre-training scripts. Finally, we would like to thank Google Cloud for providing us access to TPU v3-8 through the free cloud credits. Model trained using flax, before converted to pytorch.


### BibTeX entry and citation info.
```
@misc{david_adelani_2025,
	author       = { David Adelani },
	title        = { naija-bert-base (Revision 22c83d8) },
	year         = 2025,
	url          = { https://huggingface.co/Davlan/naija-bert-base },
	doi          = { 10.57967/hf/5864 },
	publisher    = { Hugging Face }
}
```