Causal and Masked Language Modeling of Javanese Language using Transformer-based Architectures

Most natural language understanding breakthroughs occur in popularly spoken languages, while low-resource languages are rarely examined. We pre-trained as well as compared different Transformer-based architectures on the Javanese language. They were trained on causal and masked language modeling tasks, with Javanese Wikipedia documents as corpus, and could then be fine-tuned to downstream natural language understanding tasks. To speed up pre-training, we transferred English word-embeddings, utilized gradual unfreezing of layers, and applied discriminative fine-tuning. We further fine-tuned our models to classify binary movie reviews and find that they were on par with multilingual/cross-lingual Transformers. We release our pre-trained models for others to use, in hopes of encouraging other researchers to work on low-resource languages like Javanese.