---
license: mit
tags:
- text-classification
- modernbert
- orality
- linguistics
- rhetorical-analysis
language:
- en
metrics:
- f1
- accuracy
base_model:
- answerdotai/ModernBERT-base
pipeline_tag: text-classification
library_name: transformers
datasets:
- custom
model-index:
- name: bert-marker-type
  results:
  - task:
      type: text-classification
      name: Marker Type Classification
    metrics:
    - type: f1
      value: 0.573
      name: F1 (macro)
    - type: accuracy
      value: 0.584
      name: Accuracy
---

# Havelock Marker Type Classifier

ModernBERT-based classifier for **18 rhetorical marker types** on the oral–literate spectrum, grounded in Walter Ong's *Orality and Literacy* (1982).

This is the mid-level of the Havelock span classification hierarchy. Given a text span identified as a rhetorical marker, the model classifies it into one of 18 functional types (e.g., `repetition`, `subordination`, `direct_address`, `hedging_qualification`).

## Model Details

| Property | Value |
|----------|-------|
| Base model | `answerdotai/ModernBERT-base` |
| Architecture | `ModernBertForSequenceClassification` |
| Task | Multi-class classification (18 classes) |
| Max sequence length | 128 tokens |
| Test F1 (macro) | **0.573** |
| Test Accuracy | **0.584** |
| Missing labels | **0/18** |
| Parameters | ~149M |

## Usage
```python
from transformers import AutoTokenizer, AutoModelForSequenceClassification
import torch

model_name = "HavelockAI/bert-marker-type"
tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained(model_name)
model = AutoModelForSequenceClassification.from_pretrained(model_name)

span = "whether or not the underlying assumptions hold true"
inputs = tokenizer(span, return_tensors="pt", truncation=True, max_length=128)

with torch.no_grad():
    logits = model(**inputs).logits
    pred = torch.argmax(logits, dim=1).item()

print(f"Marker type: {model.config.id2label[pred]}")
```

## Label Taxonomy (18 types)

The 18 types group fine-grained subtypes into functional families. Prior versions carried spurious label variants (e.g., `hedging` alongside `hedging_qualification`, `passive` alongside `passive_agentless`) introduced by inconsistent upstream annotation. These have been resolved via a canonical taxonomy with normalization and validation at build time.

| Oral Types (10) | Literate Types (8) |
|------------|----------------|
| `direct_address` | `subordination` |
| `repetition` | `abstraction` |
| `formulaic_phrases` | `hedging_qualification` |
| `parallelism` | `analytical_distance` |
| `parataxis` | `logical_connectives` |
| `sound_patterns` | `textual_apparatus` |
| `performance_markers` | `literate_feature` |
| `concrete_situational` | `passive_agentless` |
| `agonistic_framing` | |
| `oral_feature` | |

## Training

### Data

22,367 span-level annotations from the Havelock corpus. Each span carries a `marker_type` field normalized against a canonical taxonomy at build time. A stratified 80/10/10 train/val/test split was used with swap-based optimization to balance label distributions across splits. The test set contains 2,178 spans.

### Hyperparameters

| Parameter | Value |
|-----------|-------|
| Epochs | 20 |
| Batch size | 16 |
| Learning rate | 3e-5 |
| Optimizer | AdamW (weight decay 0.01) |
| LR schedule | Cosine with 10% warmup |
| Gradient clipping | 1.0 |
| Loss | Focal loss (γ=2.0) + class weights |
| Label smoothing | 0.0 |
| Mixout | 0.1 |
| Mixed precision | FP16 |
| Min examples per class | 50 |

### Training Metrics

Best checkpoint selected at epoch 15 by missing-label-primary, F1-tiebreaker (0 missing, F1 0.590).

### Test Set Classification Report

<details><summary>Click to expand per-class precision/recall/F1/support</summary>
```
                       precision    recall  f1-score   support

          abstraction      0.368     0.658     0.472       117
    agonistic_framing      0.857     0.750     0.800        32
  analytical_distance      0.504     0.475     0.489       120
 concrete_situational      0.509     0.385     0.438       143
       direct_address      0.671     0.689     0.680       367
    formulaic_phrases      0.205     0.608     0.307        51
hedging_qualification      0.600     0.500     0.545       114
     literate_feature      0.478     0.833     0.608        66
  logical_connectives      0.621     0.516     0.564       124
         oral_feature      0.784     0.365     0.498       159
          parallelism      0.688     0.579     0.629        19
            parataxis      0.655     0.387     0.486        93
    passive_agentless      0.721     0.500     0.590        62
  performance_markers      0.660     0.403     0.500        77
           repetition      0.738     0.705     0.721       156
       sound_patterns      0.672     0.623     0.647        69
        subordination      0.622     0.689     0.654       296
    textual_apparatus      0.718     0.655     0.685       113

             accuracy                          0.584      2178
            macro avg      0.615     0.573     0.573      2178
         weighted avg      0.624     0.584     0.587      2178
```

</details>

**Top performing types (F1 ≥ 0.65):** `agonistic_framing` (0.800), `repetition` (0.721), `textual_apparatus` (0.685), `direct_address` (0.680), `subordination` (0.654), `sound_patterns` (0.647), `parallelism` (0.629), `literate_feature` (0.608).

**Weakest types (F1 < 0.50):** `formulaic_phrases` (0.307), `concrete_situational` (0.438), `abstraction` (0.472), `parataxis` (0.486), `oral_feature` (0.498). `formulaic_phrases` suffers from severe precision collapse (P=0.205) despite reasonable recall, suggesting heavy confusion with other oral types. `oral_feature` shows the inverse pattern (P=0.784, R=0.365) — the model is confident but conservative.

## Class Distribution

| Support Range | Classes | Examples |
|---------------|---------|----------|
| >2500 | `direct_address`, `subordination`, `abstraction` | 3 |
| 1000–2500 | `repetition`, `formulaic_phrases`, `hedging_qualification`, `analytical_distance`, `concrete_situational`, `logical_connectives`, `textual_apparatus` | 7 |
| 500–1000 | `sound_patterns`, `passive_agentless`, `performance_markers`, `parataxis`, `literate_feature`, `oral_feature` | 6 |
| <500 | `agonistic_framing`, `parallelism` | 2 |

## Limitations

- **Class imbalance**: `direct_address` has 367 test examples while `parallelism` has 19. Weighted F1 (0.587) is close to macro F1 (0.573), indicating reasonably balanced performance, but rare types remain harder.
- **Span-level only**: Requires pre-extracted spans. Does not detect boundaries.
- **128-token context window**: Longer spans are truncated.
- **Abstraction underperforms**: At 0.472 F1 despite being a large class (117 test spans), suggesting the type may be too broad or overlapping with `analytical_distance` and `literate_feature`.
- **Precision-recall asymmetry**: Several types show strong precision–recall imbalance (`oral_feature` P=0.784/R=0.365; `formulaic_phrases` P=0.205/R=0.608), indicating the focal loss weighting could be further tuned.

## Theoretical Background

The type level captures functional groupings within the oral–literate framework. Oral types reflect Ong's characterization of oral discourse as additive (`parataxis`), aggregative (`formulaic_phrases`), redundant (`repetition`), agonistically toned (`agonistic_framing`), empathetic and participatory (`direct_address`), and close to the human lifeworld (`concrete_situational`). Literate types capture the analytic (`abstraction`, `subordination`), distanced (`analytical_distance`, `passive_agentless`), and self-referential (`textual_apparatus`) qualities of written discourse.

## Related Models

| Model | Task | Classes | F1 |
|-------|------|---------|-----|
| [`HavelockAI/bert-marker-category`](https://huggingface.co/HavelockAI/bert-marker-category) | Binary (oral/literate) | 2 | 0.875 |
| **This model** | Functional type | 18 | 0.573 |
| [`HavelockAI/bert-marker-subtype`](https://huggingface.co/HavelockAI/bert-marker-subtype) | Fine-grained subtype | 71 | 0.493 |
| [`HavelockAI/bert-orality-regressor`](https://huggingface.co/HavelockAI/bert-orality-regressor) | Document-level score | Regression | MAE 0.079 |
| [`HavelockAI/bert-token-classifier`](https://huggingface.co/HavelockAI/bert-token-classifier) | Span detection (BIO) | 145 | 0.500 |

## Citation
```bibtex
@misc{havelock2026type,
  title={Havelock Marker Type Classifier},
  author={Havelock AI},
  year={2026},
  url={https://huggingface.co/HavelockAI/bert-marker-type}
}
```

## References

- Ong, Walter J. *Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word*. Routledge, 1982.
- Lee, C. et al. "Mixout: Effective Regularization to Finetune Large-scale Pretrained Language Models." ICLR 2020.
- Warner, A. et al. "Smarter, Better, Faster, Longer: A Modern Bidirectional Encoder for Fast, Memory Efficient, and Long Context Finetuning and Inference." 2024.

---

*Trained: February 2026*