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Model description

Funnel Transformer is a transformers model pretrained on a large corpus of English data in a self-supervised fashion. This means it was pretrained on the raw texts only, with no humans labelling them in any way (which is why it can use lots of publicly available data) with an automatic process to generate inputs and labels from those texts.

More precisely, a small language model corrupts the input texts and serves as a generator of inputs for this model, and the pretraining objective is to predict which token is an original and which one has been replaced, a bit like a GAN training.

This way, the model learns an inner representation of the English language that can then be used to extract features useful for downstream tasks: if you have a dataset of labeled sentences for instance, you can train a standard classifier using the features produced by the BERT model as inputs.

Intended uses & limitations

You can use the raw model to extract a vector representation of a given text, but it's mostly intended to be fine-tuned on a downstream task. See the model hub to look for fine-tuned versions on a task that interests you.

Note that this model is primarily aimed at being fine-tuned on tasks that use the whole sentence (potentially masked) to make decisions, such as sequence classification, token classification or question answering. For tasks such as text generation you should look at model like GPT2.

How to use

Here is how to use this model to get the features of a given text in PyTorch:

from transformers import FunnelTokenizer, FunnelModel
tokenizer = FunnelTokenizer.from_pretrained("funnel-transformer/small")
model = FunneModel.from_pretrained("funnel-transformer/small")
text = "Replace me by any text you'd like."
encoded_input = tokenizer(text, return_tensors='pt')
output = model(**encoded_input)

and in TensorFlow:

from transformers import FunnelTokenizer, TFFunnelModel
tokenizer = FunnelTokenizer.from_pretrained("funnel-transformer/small")
model = TFFunnelModel.from_pretrained("funnel-transformer/small")
text = "Replace me by any text you'd like."
encoded_input = tokenizer(text, return_tensors='tf')
output = model(encoded_input)

Training data

The BERT model was pretrained on:

• BookCorpus, a dataset consisting of 11,038 unpublished books,
• English Wikipedia (excluding lists, tables and headers),
• Clue Web, a dataset of 733,019,372 English web pages,
• GigaWord, an archive of newswire text data,
• Common Crawl, a dataset of raw web pages.

BibTeX entry and citation info

@misc{dai2020funneltransformer,
    title={Funnel-Transformer: Filtering out Sequential Redundancy for Efficient Language Processing},
    author={Zihang Dai and Guokun Lai and Yiming Yang and Quoc V. Le},
    year={2020},
    eprint={2006.03236},
    archivePrefix={arXiv},
    primaryClass={cs.LG}
}