# Benchmarking BERT-based Models for Sentence-level Topic Classification in Nepali Language

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.23940 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.23940/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 7 of its 15 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Feb 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Unsupervised Cross-lingual Representation Learning at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02116/) (2019)
- [DeBERTa: Decoding-enhanced BERT with Disentangled Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.03654/) (2020)
- [MuRIL: Multilingual Representations for Indian Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.10730/) (2021)
- [L3Cube-HindBERT and DevBERT: Pre-Trained BERT Transformer models for Devanagari based Hindi and Marathi Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.11418/) (2022)
- [Potrika: Raw and Balanced Newspaper Datasets in the Bangla Language with Eight Topics and Five Attributes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.09389/) (2022)
- [L3Cube-MahaNews: News-based Short Text and Long Document Classification Datasets in Marathi](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.18216/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Transformer-based models such as BERT have significantly advanced Natural Language Processing (NLP) across many languages. However, Nepali, a low-resource language written in Devanagari script, remains relatively underexplored. This study benchmarks multilingual, Indic, Hindi, and Nepali BERT variants to evaluate their effectiveness in Nepali topic classification. Ten pre-trained models, including mBERT, XLM-R, MuRIL, DevBERT, HindiBERT, IndicBERT, and NepBERTa, were fine-tuned and tested on the balanced Nepali dataset containing 25,006 sentences across five conceptual domains and the performance was evaluated using accuracy, weighted precision, recall, F1-score, and AUROC metrics. The results reveal that Indic models, particularly MuRIL-large, achieved the highest F1-score of 90.60%, outperforming multilingual and monolingual models. NepBERTa also performed competitively with an F1-score of 88.26%. Overall, these findings establish a robust baseline for future document-level classification and broader Nepali NLP applications.