Abstract

Transformers have recently taken the centre stage in language modeling after LSTM’s were considered the dominant model architecture for a long time. In this project, we investigate the performance of the Transformer architectures-BERT and Transformer-XL for the language modeling task. We use a sub-word model setting with the Finnish language and compare it to the previous State of the art (SOTA) LSTM model. BERT achieves a pseudo-perplexity score of 14.5, which is a first such measure achieved as far as we know. Transformer-XL improves upon the perplexity score to 73.58 which is 27% better than the LSTM model.