# TunBERT: Pretrained Contextualized Text Representation for Tunisian Dialect

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2111.13138 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.13138/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 16 of its 34 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 Nov 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Efficient Estimation of Word Representations in Vector Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1301.3781/) (2013)
- [ALBERT: A Lite BERT for Self-supervised Learning of Language Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.11942/) (2019)
- [Deep contextualized word representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.05365/) (2018)
- [Enriching Word Vectors with Subword Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.04606/) (2016)
- [Cross-lingual Language Model Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.07291/) (2019)
- [Reading Wikipedia to Answer Open-Domain Questions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.00051/) (2017)
- [How multilingual is Multilingual BERT?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.01502/) (2019)
- [CamemBERT: a Tasty French Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.03894/) (2019)
- [AraBERT: Transformer-based Model for Arabic Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.00104/) (2020)
- [FlauBERT: Unsupervised Language Model Pre-training for French](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.05372/) (2019)
- [Multilingual is not enough: BERT for Finnish](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.07076/) (2019)
- [RobBERT: a Dutch RoBERTa-based Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.06286/) (2020)
- [Neural Arabic Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.05394/) (2019)
- [TUNIZI: a Tunisian Arabizi sentiment analysis Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.14303/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Revisiting Common Assumptions about Arabic Dialects in NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.21816/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Pretrained contextualized text representation models learn an effective representation of a natural language to make it machine understandable. After the breakthrough of the attention mechanism, a new generation of pretrained models have been proposed achieving good performances since the introduction of the Transformer. Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) has become the state-of-the-art model for language understanding. Despite their success, most of the available models have been trained on Indo-European languages however similar research for under-represented languages and dialects remains sparse. In this paper, we investigate the feasibility of training monolingual Transformer-based language models for under represented languages, with a specific focus on the Tunisian dialect. We evaluate our language model on sentiment analysis task, dialect identification task and reading comprehension question-answering task. We show that the use of noisy web crawled data instead of structured data (Wikipedia, articles, etc.) is more convenient for such non-standardized language. Moreover, results indicate that a relatively small web crawled dataset leads to performances that are as good as those obtained using larger datasets. Finally, our best performing TunBERT model reaches or improves the state-of-the-art in all three downstream tasks. We release the TunBERT pretrained model and the datasets used for fine-tuning.