Can BERT generate Quebec English? : exploring and improving the acceptability of regional variation in pretrained language models
Bibliographic record
Abstract
While pretrained language models have transformed natural language processing by generating contextually rich language representations, their performance can vary widely across different language varieties. Monolingual models, trained on large datasets in a single language, may struggle with language varieties that incorporate elements from multiple languages. This thesis examines the ability of pretrained language models, particularly BERT, to handle Quebec English, a regionally influenced variety of English shaped by contact with French. By comparing three different BERT models-one monolingual, one multilingual, and one fine-tuned on Quebec English-specific data-this study evaluates their effectiveness in generating Quebec English target words and English synonyms within a masked language modeling framework. Results suggest that fine-tuning improves performance for Quebec English-specific target words, outperforming the standard pretrained models. Additionally, findings indicate that tokenization, sentence context, and pretraining data substantially impact prediction accuracy, with all models struggling most with infrequent, region-specific expressions. This work contributes to the broader goal of developing natural language processing tools that inclusively represent diverse linguistic communities, underscoring the importance of fine-tuning in adapting language models to regional and minority language varieties.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".