---
license: apache-2.0
language:
- ha
- yo
- ig
- pcm
library_name: transformers
pipeline_tag: fill-mask
tags:
- nigerian
- hausa
- yoruba
- igbo
- naija
- nigerian-pidgin
- masked-lm
- encoder
- modernbert
- olaverse_mist
datasets:
- HuggingFaceFW/fineweb-2
- castorini/wura
- asr-nigerian-pidgin/nigerian-pidgin-1.0
---

![mist models](https://cdn-uploads.huggingface.co/production/uploads/69949cbacd82af728f850c12/WzzrAklKUsaCCTTASicDf.png)

# mist-encoder-base-ng

A small (30.9M-parameter) modern encoder specialised for **Nigerian languages** —
Hausa (ha), Yoruba (yo), Igbo (ig), and Nigerian Pidgin (pcm) — pretrained **from
scratch** with a masked-language-modeling (MLM) objective using the unified
[`olaverse/otk-bpe-50k`](https://huggingface.co/olaverse/otk-bpe-50k) (Naija) tokenizer.

It is a deliberate **specialist**: a compact base you attach task heads to
(classification, NER, language-ID, sentence embeddings). It is **not** intended to
compete on raw task accuracy with larger multilingual or African-language encoders —
its value is efficiency, a low-fertility Nigerian tokenizer, explicit Pidgin support,
0% UNK, and a clean Apache-2.0 release.

## TL;DR — what it is and isn't

- **Strong** on sentence-level tasks (topic/sentiment classification) relative to its size.
- **Efficient**: 30.9M parameters vs 126M (AfriBERTa) / 178M (mBERT) / 270M (XLM-R).
- **Tokenizer edge**: lower fertility than general multilingual tokenizers on Nigerian text.
- **Limited** on token-level tasks (NER): trails larger specialists by ~10–20 F1. This is
  structural (tokenizer fragmentation + model capacity), not a tuning artifact. See
  [Limitations](#limitations).

## Intended use

Load the encoder body and attach a head:

```python
from transformers import AutoModel, AutoTokenizer
tok = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained("olaverse/mist-encoder-base-ng")
enc = AutoModel.from_pretrained("olaverse/mist-encoder-base-ng")
```

Good fits: topic/sentiment/language-ID classification, sentence embeddings (contrastive
fine-tuning), and on-device / low-resource deployment where 28–30M params matters. NER is
supported but weaker than larger models (see below).

## Training data

All sources are commercial-friendly (attribution-only), consistent with the Apache-2.0 release:

| Source | License | Role |
| --- | --- | --- |
| [FineWeb-2](https://huggingface.co/datasets/HuggingFaceFW/fineweb-2) (ha/yo/ig/pcm) | ODC-By | Web text |
| [castorini/wura](https://huggingface.co/datasets/castorini/wura) (Nigerian subset) | Apache-2.0 | Audited mC4 + news |
| [asr-nigerian-pidgin/nigerian-pidgin-1.0](https://huggingface.co/datasets/asr-nigerian-pidgin/nigerian-pidgin-1.0) | CC-BY-4.0 | Fresh Pidgin sentences |

FineWeb-2 and WURA both descend from Common Crawl / mC4, so documents were **cross-deduped**.
The corpus was **language-balanced** (abundant Hausa capped; scarce Igbo/Pidgin taken in full,
with the smallest language lightly upsampled) and **chunked** into 254-token windows so all
text was used rather than truncating each document. Final training corpus: ~480k chunks.

## Training details

- **Objective:** masked language modeling (15% masking), from random init.
- **Architecture:** ModernBERT — hidden 384, 6 layers, 6 heads, FFN 1152, max positions 1024.
- **Tokenizer:** `olaverse/otk-bpe-50k` unified Naija — byte-level BPE, ~50k vocab, 0% UNK,
  NFC diacritic preservation, code-mixed English support.
- **Schedule:** 16 epochs (~60k steps), batch size 128, bf16, AdamW, cosine LR 1e-4, 500 warmup.
- **Result:** final train MLM loss **2.06**, held-out eval loss **~2.21**. Eval loss decreased
  monotonically and plateaued — **no overfitting**. (In hindsight ~11 epochs would have
  reached ~95% of the quality; 16 was more than this corpus needed.)
- **Parameters:** 30.9M total; the ~50k-token embedding table is roughly two-thirds of that,
  so the transformer itself is only ~11M.

## Evaluation

Three benchmarks, all four languages, compared against AfriBERTa (v2, 126M) and mBERT (178M).
Numbers are honest and include where the model is weaker.

### 1. Tokenizer fertility (tokens/word — lower is better)

From the `otk-bpe-50k` unified-Naija benchmark (MasakhaNEWS):

| Tokenizer | Hausa | Yoruba | Igbo | Pidgin |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| **otk-bpe-50k (ours)** | **1.231** | **1.296** | **1.416** | **1.249** |
| GPT-4o (o200k) | 1.589 | 1.687 | 1.807 | 1.304 |
| AfroXLMR | 1.604 | 2.277 | 2.570 | 1.401 |

Lower fertility = more signal per token at a fixed sequence length. The tokenizer beats
general multilingual tokenizers on all four languages.

### 2. Topic classification — MasakhaNEWS (macro-F1, max_length 512)

| Model | Params | Hausa | Yoruba | Igbo | Pidgin |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| **mist-encoder-base-ng** | 30.9M | 0.878 | 0.859 | 0.803 | 0.898 |
| AfriBERTa | 126M | 0.924 | 0.921 | 0.914 | 0.991 |
| mBERT | 178M | 0.806 | 0.886 | 0.805 | 0.967 |

Competitive at a fraction of the size — **beats mBERT on Hausa**, ties on Igbo, trails AfriBERTa.

### 3. Named-entity recognition — MasakhaNER 2.0 (entity-F1, seqeval, max_length 512)

| Model | Params | Hausa | Yoruba | Igbo | Pidgin |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| **mist-encoder-base-ng** | 30.9M | 0.656 | 0.779 | 0.804 | 0.729 |
| AfriBERTa | 126M | 0.850 | 0.867 | 0.897 | 0.886 |
| mBERT | 178M | 0.810 | 0.837 | 0.855 | 0.881 |

The model trails both baselines on NER. This is the honest weak spot — see below.

## Limitations

- **Token-level tasks (NER) are the weakness.** The gap to larger models is ~10–20 entity-F1
  and is **structural**, not a tuning artifact: it persists across seeds (std 0.005) and is
  unchanged by labeling all subwords vs first-subword-only. Two causes: (a) the unified 50k
  tokenizer fragments entity words more than language-specific tokenizers — on Hausa NER text,
  ~61% of entity words split into multiple subwords (vs ~21% for AfriBERTa), so per-token
  representations carry less whole-word meaning; (b) at 30.9M parameters the model has less
  capacity to reassemble meaning from fragments than a 126M model. Use a larger model if NER
  accuracy is critical.
- **Hausa NER is notably low (0.656).** Fragmentation on the MasakhaNER Hausa corpus is high
  (~1.52 subwords/word, vs ~1.23 on the tokenizer's MasakhaNEWS benchmark), suggesting an
  orthography/domain mismatch worth investigating for a future version.
- **Nigerian Pidgin pretraining data is scarce.** Clean, permissively-licensed Pidgin text is
  limited; the Pidgin slice was lightly upsampled. Treat Pidgin as supported but thinner than
  the other three.
- **Small model.** Best for sentence-level understanding and efficient deployment, not as a
  drop-in for the strongest available African-language encoders on hard tasks.

## What would improve a v2

Evidence-backed, in priority order: (1) more model capacity (~50–80M) — NER is where the
parameter gap bit hardest; (2) a less-fragmenting tokenizer for token tasks (larger vocab or
per-language merge budgets); (3) more pretraining data, especially Pidgin and Hausa. Longer
pretraining is **not** a lever — eval loss already plateaued by ~epoch 11.

## License

Apache-2.0. Training data is attribution-only (ODC-By / Apache-2.0 / CC-BY-4.0); please retain
attribution to the upstream datasets.

## Acknowledgements & citations

Built with [FineWeb-2](https://huggingface.co/datasets/HuggingFaceFW/fineweb-2),
[WURA](https://huggingface.co/datasets/castorini/wura) (Oladipo et al., EMNLP 2023), and the
[Nigerian Pidgin ASR](https://huggingface.co/datasets/asr-nigerian-pidgin/nigerian-pidgin-1.0)
corpus. Evaluated on MasakhaNEWS and MasakhaNER 2.0 (Adelani et al., Masakhane). AfriBERTa
(Ogueji et al., 2021) and mBERT (Devlin et al., 2019) used as comparison baselines.