Exploring Swedish & English fastText Embeddings for NER with the Transformer

Abstract: In this paper, our main contributions are that embeddings from relatively smaller corpora can outperform ones from larger corpora and we make the new Swedish analogy test set publicly available. To achieve a good network performance in NLP downstream tasks, several factors play important roles: dataset size, the right hyper-parameters, and well-trained embeddings. We show that, with the right set of hyper-parameters, good network performance can be reached even on smaller datasets. We evaluate the embeddings at both the intrinsic and extrinsic levels. The embeddings are deployed with the Transformer in named entity recognition (NER) task and significance tests conducted. This is done for both Swedish and English. We obtain better performance in both languages on the downstream task with smaller training data, compared to recently released, Common Crawl versions; and character n-grams appear useful for Swedish, a morphologically rich language.