readme: ---
  language: de
  widget:
  - text: "Heute ist sehr schönes Wetter in"
  license: mit
  ---
  
  # German GPT-2 model
  In this repository we release (yet another) GPT-2 model, that was trained on ~90 GB from the ["German colossal, clean Common Crawl corpus"](https://german-nlp-group.github.io/projects/gc4-corpus.html) (GC4).
  
  The model is meant to be an entry point for fine-tuning on other texts, and it is definitely not as good or "dangerous" as the English GPT-3 model. We do not plan extensive PR or staged releases for this model 😉
  
  ---
  
  **Disclaimer**: the presented and trained language models in this repository are for **research only** purposes.
  The GC4 corpus - that was used for training - contains crawled texts from the internet. Thus, this GPT-2 model can
  be considered as highly biased, resulting in a model that encodes stereotypical associations along gender, race,
  ethnicity and disability status. Before using and working with the released checkpoints, it is highly recommended
  to read:
  
  [On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?](https://faculty.washington.edu/ebender/papers/Stochastic_Parrots.pdf)
  
  from Emily M. Bender, Timnit Gebru, Angelina McMillan-Major and Shmargaret Shmitchell.
  
  The aim of this released GPT-2 model for German is to boost research on (large) pre-trained language models for German, especially
  for identifying biases and how to prevent them, as most research is currently done for English only.
  
  ---
  
  # Changelog
  
  * 17.10.2021: We highly recommend to try the Text Generation Pipeline in Transformers. The quality of the generated text from the Inference Widget here can be lower.
  * 06.09.2021: Initial release. Detailed information about training parameters coming soon.
  
  # Text Generation
  
  The following code snippet can be used to generate text with this German GPT-2 model:
  
  ```python
  from transformers import pipeline
  
  model_name = "stefan-it/german-gpt2-larger"
  
  pipe = pipeline('text-generation', model=model_name, tokenizer=model_name)
  
  text = pipe("Der Sinn des Lebens ist es", max_length=200)[0]["generated_text"]
  
  print(text)
  ```
  
  # Training Data
  
  The following archives are used for training the (first version) of this GPT-2 model:
  
  * `de_head_0000_2015-48.tar.gz`
  * `de_head_0000_2016-18.tar.gz`
  * `de_head_0000_2016-44.tar.gz`
  * `de_head_0000_2017-13.tar.gz`
  * `de_head_0000_2017-30.tar.gz`
  * `de_head_0000_2017-39.tar.gz`
  * `de_head_0000_2017-51.tar.gz`
  * `de_head_0000_2018-09.tar.gz`
  * `de_head_0000_2018-17.tar.gz`
  * `de_head_0000_2018-30.tar.gz`
  * `de_head_0000_2018-39.tar.gz`
  * `de_head_0000_2018-51.tar.gz`
  * `de_head_0000_2019-18.tar.gz`
  * `de_head_0000_2019-30.tar.gz`
  * `de_head_0006_2019-09.tar.gz`
  * `de_head_0006_2019-18.tar.gz`
  * `de_head_0006_2019-30.tar.gz`
  * `de_head_0006_2019-47.tar.gz`
  * `de_head_0006_2020-10.tar.gz`
  * `de_head_0007_2018-30.tar.gz`
  * `de_head_0007_2018-51.tar.gz`
  * `de_head_0007_2019-09.tar.gz`
  * `de_head_0007_2019-18.tar.gz`
  * `de_head_0007_2019-47.tar.gz`
  * `de_head_0007_2020-10.tar.gz`
  
  Details and URLs can be found on the [GC4](https://german-nlp-group.github.io/projects/gc4-corpus.html)
  page.
  
  Archives are then extracted and NLTK (`german` model) is used to sentence split the corpus.
  This results in a total training corpus size of 90GB.
  
  # Training Details
  
  We use the recently re-trained `dbmdz/german-gpt2` ([version 2](https://huggingface.co/dbmdz/german-gpt2)!)
  model as back-bone model. Thus, the tokenizer and vocab is the same as used in the `dbmdz/german-gpt2` model.
  
  The model was trained on a v3-8 TPU, with the following parameters:
  
  ```bash
  python ./run_clm_flax.py --output_dir=/mnt/datasets/german-gpt2-larger/ --name_or_path dbmdz/german-gpt2 --do_train --do_eval --block_size=512 --per_device_train_batch_size=16 --per_device_eval_batch_size=16 --learning_rate=5e-3 --warmup_steps=1000 --adam_beta1=0.9 --adam_beta2=0.98 --weight_decay=0.01 --overwrite_output_dir --num_train_epochs=20 --logging_steps=500 --save_steps=2500 --eval_steps=2500 --train_file /mnt/datasets/gc4/train.txt --validation_file /mnt/datasets/gc4/validation.txt --preprocessing_num_workers 16
  ```
  
  Training took around 17 days for 20 epochs.
  
  # Acknowledgments
  Research supported with Cloud TPUs from Google's TensorFlow Research Cloud (TFRC).
  Thanks for providing access to the TFRC ❤️
  
  Thanks to the generous support from the [Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/) team,
  it is possible to download this model from their S3 storage 🤗
  
  This project heavily profited from the amazing Hugging Face
  [Community Week](https://discuss.huggingface.co/t/open-to-the-community-community-week-using-jax-flax-for-nlp-cv/7104).
  Many thanks for the great organization and discussions during and after the week!