L3Cube-MahaNews: News-based Short Text and Long Document Classification Datasets in Marathi

The availability of text or topic classification datasets in the low-resource Marathi language is limited, typically consisting of fewer than 4 target labels, with some achieving nearly perfect accuracy. In this work, we introduce L3Cube-MahaNews, a Marathi text classification corpus that focuses on News headlines and articles. This corpus stands out as the largest supervised Marathi Corpus, containing over 1.05L records classified into a diverse range of 12 categories. To accommodate different document lengths, MahaNews comprises three supervised datasets specifically designed for short text, long documents, and medium paragraphs. The consistent labeling across these datasets facilitates document length-based analysis. We provide detailed data statistics and baseline results on these datasets using state-of-the-art pre-trained BERT models. We conduct a comparative analysis between monolingual and multilingual BERT models, including MahaBERT, IndicBERT, and MuRIL. The monolingual MahaBERT model outperforms all others on every dataset. These resources also serve as Marathi topic classification datasets or models and are publicly available at https://github.com/l3cube-pune/MarathiNLP .

TextGram: Towards a better domain-adaptive pretraining

For green AI, it is crucial to measure and reduce the carbon footprint emitted during the training of large language models. In NLP, performing pre-training on Transformer models requires significant computational resources. This pre-training involves using a large amount of text data to gain prior knowledge for performing downstream tasks. Thus, it is important that we select the correct data in the form of domain-specific data from this vast corpus to achieve optimum results aligned with our domain-specific tasks. While training on large unsupervised data is expensive, it can be optimized by performing a data selection step before pretraining. Selecting important data reduces the space overhead and the substantial amount of time required to pre-train the model while maintaining constant accuracy. We investigate the existing selection strategies and propose our own domain-adaptive data selection method - TextGram - that effectively selects essential data from large corpora. We compare and evaluate the results of finetuned models for text classification task with and without data selection. We show that the proposed strategy works better compared to other selection methods.

mahaNLP: A Marathi Natural Language Processing Library

We present mahaNLP, an open-source natural language processing (NLP) library specifically built for the Marathi language. It aims to enhance the support for the low-resource Indian language Marathi in the field of NLP. It is an easy-to-use, extensible, and modular toolkit for Marathi text analysis built on state-of-the-art MahaBERT-based transformer models. Our work holds significant importance as other existing Indic NLP libraries provide basic Marathi processing support and rely on older models with restricted performance. Our toolkit stands out by offering a comprehensive array of NLP tasks, encompassing both fundamental preprocessing tasks and advanced NLP tasks like sentiment analysis, NER, hate speech detection, and sentence completion. This paper focuses on an overview of the mahaNLP framework, its features, and its usage. This work is a part of the L3Cube MahaNLP initiative, more information about it can be found at https://github.com/l3cube-pune/MarathiNLP .