TransBERT-bio-fr

TransBERT-bio-fr is a French biomedical language model pretrained exclusively on synthetically translated PubMed abstracts, using the TransCorpus framework. This model demonstrates that high-quality domain-specific language models can be built for low-resource languages using only machine-translated data.

Model Details

• Architecture: BERT-base (12 layers, 768 hidden, 12 heads, 110M parameters)
• Tokenizer: SentencePiece unigram, 32k vocab, trained on synthetic biomedical French
• Training Data: 36.4GB corpus, 22M PubMed abstracts, translated from English to French, available as the fra_Latn config of TransCorpus-bio 🤗
• Translation Model: M2M-100 (1.2B) using TransCorpus Toolkit
• Domain: Biomedical, clinical, life sciences (French)

Motivation

The lack of large-scale, high-quality biomedical corpora in French has historically limited the development of domain-specific language models. TransBERT-bio-fr addresses this gap by leveraging recent advances in neural machine translation to generate a massive, high-quality synthetic corpus, making robust French biomedical NLP possible.

How to Use

Loading the model and tokenizer :

from transformers import AutoModel, AutoTokenizer

tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained("jknafou/TransBERT-bio-fr")
model = AutoModel.from_pretrained("jknafou/TransBERT-bio-fr")

Perform the mask filling task :

from transformers import pipeline 

fill_mask  = pipeline("fill-mask", model="jknafou/TransBERT-bio-fr", tokenizer="jknafou/TransBERT-bio-fr")
results = fill_mask("L’insuline est une hormone produite par le <mask> et régule la glycémie.")
# [{'score': 0.6606941223144531,
#   'token': 486,
#   'token_str': 'foie',
#   'sequence': 'L’insuline est une hormone produite par le foie et régule la glycémie.'},
#  {'score': 0.172934889793396,
#   'token': 2642,
#   'token_str': 'pancréas',
#   'sequence': 'L’insuline est une hormone produite par le pancréas et régule la glycémie.'},
#  {'score': 0.08486421406269073,
#   'token': 488,
#   'token_str': 'cerveau',
#   'sequence': 'L’insuline est une hormone produite par le cerveau et régule la glycémie.'},
#  {'score': 0.017183693125844002,
#   'token': 2092,
#   'token_str': 'cœur',
#   'sequence': 'L’insuline est une hormone produite par le cœur et régule la glycémie.'},
#  {'score': 0.009480085223913193,
#   'token': 712,
#   'token_str': 'corps',
#   'sequence': 'L’insuline est une hormone produite par le corps et régule la glycémie.'}]

Key Results

TransBERT-bio-fr sets a new state-of-the-art (SOTA) on the French biomedical benchmark DrBenchmark, outperforming both general-domain (CamemBERT) and previous domain-specific (DrBERT) models on classification, NER, POS, and STS tasks.

^*Statistically significance (Friedman & Nemenyi test, p<0.01).

Paper published at EMNLP2025

TransCorpus enables the training of state-of-the-art language models through synthetic translation. For example, TransBERT achieved superior performance by leveraging corpus translation with this toolkit. A paper detailing these results will be submitted to EMNLP 2025. 📝 Current Paper Version

Why Synthetic Translation?

• Scalable: Enables pretraining on gigabytes of text for any language with a strong MT system.
• Effective: Outperforms models trained on native data in key biomedical tasks.
• Accessible: Makes high-quality domain-specific PLMs possible for low-resource languages.

🔗 Related Resources

This model was pretrained on large-scale synthetic French biomedical data generated using TransCorpus, an open-source toolkit for scalable, parallel translation and preprocessing. For source code, data recipes, and reproducible pipelines, visit the TransCorpus GitHub repository. If you use this model, please cite:

  @inproceedings{knafou-etal-2025-transbert,
      title = "{T}rans{BERT}: A Framework for Synthetic Translation in Domain-Specific Language Modeling",
      author = {Knafou, Julien  and
        Mottin, Luc  and
        Mottaz, Ana{\"i}s  and
        Flament, Alexandre  and
        Ruch, Patrick},
      editor = "Christodoulopoulos, Christos  and
        Chakraborty, Tanmoy  and
        Rose, Carolyn  and
        Peng, Violet",
      booktitle = "Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025",
      month = nov,
      year = "2025",
      address = "Suzhou, China",
      publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
      url = "https://aclanthology.org/2025.findings-emnlp.1053/",
      doi = "10.18653/v1/2025.findings-emnlp.1053",
      pages = "19338--19354",
      ISBN = "979-8-89176-335-7",
      abstract = "The scarcity of non-English language data in specialized domains significantly limits the development of effective Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools. We present TransBERT, a novel framework for pre-training language models using exclusively synthetically translated text, and introduce TransCorpus, a scalable translation toolkit. Focusing on the life sciences domain in French, our approach demonstrates that state-of-the-art performance on various downstream tasks can be achieved solely by leveraging synthetically translated data. We release the TransCorpus toolkit, the TransCorpus-bio-fr corpus (36.4GB of French life sciences text), TransBERT-bio-fr, its associated pre-trained language model and reproducible code for both pre-training and fine-tuning. Our results highlight the viability of synthetic translation in a high-resource translation direction for building high-quality NLP resources in low-resource language/domain pairs."
  }