CliReBERT 🌍🧠

CliReBERT (Climate Research BERT) is a domain-specific BERT model pretrained from scratch on a curated corpus of peer-reviewed climate change research papers. It is built to support natural language processing tasks in climate science and environmental studies.

🔍 Overview

• Architecture: BERT-base (uncased)
• Parameters: ~110M
• Pretraining Objective: Masked Language Modeling (MLM)
• Tokenizer: Trained from scratch (WordPiece) on the same domain corpus
• Language: English
• Domain: Climate change research (scientific)

📊 Performance

Evaluated on ClimaBench (a climate-focused NLP benchmark):

Outperformed baseline models like SciBERT, RoBERTa, and ClimateBERT on key tasks.

Climate performance model card:

🧪 Intended Uses

Use for:

• Scientific information extraction in climate change research
• Classification, relation extraction, and document tagging in climate-related corpora
• Enhancing climate-focused knowledge graph construction

Not suitable for:

• General-purpose NLP tasks
• Text outside the scientific environmental domain
• Non-English applications

Example:

from transformers import AutoTokenizer, AutoModelForMaskedLM, pipeline
import torch

# Load the pretrained model and tokenizer
model_name = "P0L3/clirebert_clirevocab_uncased"
tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained(model_name)
model = AutoModelForMaskedLM.from_pretrained(model_name)

# Move model to GPU if available
device = 0 if torch.cuda.is_available() else -1

# Create a fill-mask pipeline
fill_mask = pipeline("fill-mask", model=model, tokenizer=tokenizer, device=device)

# Example input from scientific climate literature
text = "The increase in greenhouse gas emissions has significantly affected the [MASK] balance of the Earth."

# Run prediction
predictions = fill_mask(text)

# Show top predictions
print(text)
print(10*">")
for p in predictions:
    print(f"{p['sequence']} — {p['score']:.4f}")

Output:

The increase in greenhouse gas emissions has significantly affected the [MASK] balance of the Earth.
>>>>>>>>>>
the increase in greenhouse gas ... affected the energy balance of the earth . — 0.6922
the increase in greenhouse gas ... affected the mass balance of the earth . — 0.0631
the increase in greenhouse gas ... affected the radiation balance of the earth . — 0.0606
the increase in greenhouse gas ... affected the radiative balance of the earth . — 0.0517
the increase in greenhouse gas ... affected the carbon balance of the earth . — 0.0365

⚠️ Limitations

• Trained only on scientific literature (limited sociopolitical text exposure)
• Monolingual (English)
• May reflect publication biases from the scientific community

🧾 Citation

If you use this model, please cite:

@Article{Poleksić2025,
  author={Poleksi{\'{c}}, Andrija
  and Martin{\v{c}}i{\'{c}}-Ip{\v{s}}i{\'{c}}, Sanda},
  title={Pretraining and evaluation of BERT models for climate research},
  journal={Discover Applied Sciences},
  year={2025},
  month={Oct},
  day={24},
  volume={7},
  number={11},
  pages={1278},
  issn={3004-9261},
  doi={10.1007/s42452-025-07740-5},
  url={https://doi.org/10.1007/s42452-025-07740-5}
}