TabiBERT: A Large-Scale ModernBERT Foundation Model and A Unified Benchmark for Turkish

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Main Authors: Türker, Melikşah, Kızıloğlu, A. Ebrar, Güngör, Onur, Üsküdarlı, Susan
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Türker, Melikşah
Kızıloğlu, A. Ebrar
Güngör, Onur
Üsküdarlı, Susan
author_facet Türker, Melikşah
Kızıloğlu, A. Ebrar
Güngör, Onur
Üsküdarlı, Susan
contents Since the inception of BERT, encoder-only Transformers have evolved significantly in computational efficiency, training stability, and long-context modeling. ModernBERT consolidates these advances by integrating Rotary Positional Embeddings (RoPE), FlashAttention, and refined normalization. Despite these developments, Turkish NLP lacks a monolingual encoder trained from scratch, incorporating such modern architectural paradigms. This work introduces TabiBERT, a monolingual Turkish encoder based on ModernBERT architecture trained from scratch on a large, curated corpus. TabiBERT is pre-trained on one trillion tokens sampled from an 84.88B token multi-domain corpus: web text (73%), scientific publications (20%), source code (6%), and mathematical content (0.3%). It supports 8,192-token context length (16x original BERT), achieves up to 2.65x inference speedup, and reduces GPU memory consumption, enabling larger batch sizes. We introduce TabiBench with 28 datasets across eight task categories with standardized splits and protocols, evaluated using GLUE-style macro-averaging. TabiBERT attains 77.58 on TabiBench, outperforming BERTurk by 1.62 points and establishing state-of-the-art on five of eight categories, with particularly strong gains on question answering (+9.55 points), code retrieval (+2.41 points), and academic understanding (+0.66 points). Compared with task-specific prior best results, including specialized models like TurkishBERTweet, TabiBERT achieves +1.47 average improvement, indicating robust cross-domain generalization. We release model weights, training configurations, and evaluation code for transparent, reproducible Turkish encoder research.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_23065
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle TabiBERT: A Large-Scale ModernBERT Foundation Model and A Unified Benchmark for Turkish
Türker, Melikşah
Kızıloğlu, A. Ebrar
Güngör, Onur
Üsküdarlı, Susan
Computation and Language
Since the inception of BERT, encoder-only Transformers have evolved significantly in computational efficiency, training stability, and long-context modeling. ModernBERT consolidates these advances by integrating Rotary Positional Embeddings (RoPE), FlashAttention, and refined normalization. Despite these developments, Turkish NLP lacks a monolingual encoder trained from scratch, incorporating such modern architectural paradigms. This work introduces TabiBERT, a monolingual Turkish encoder based on ModernBERT architecture trained from scratch on a large, curated corpus. TabiBERT is pre-trained on one trillion tokens sampled from an 84.88B token multi-domain corpus: web text (73%), scientific publications (20%), source code (6%), and mathematical content (0.3%). It supports 8,192-token context length (16x original BERT), achieves up to 2.65x inference speedup, and reduces GPU memory consumption, enabling larger batch sizes. We introduce TabiBench with 28 datasets across eight task categories with standardized splits and protocols, evaluated using GLUE-style macro-averaging. TabiBERT attains 77.58 on TabiBench, outperforming BERTurk by 1.62 points and establishing state-of-the-art on five of eight categories, with particularly strong gains on question answering (+9.55 points), code retrieval (+2.41 points), and academic understanding (+0.66 points). Compared with task-specific prior best results, including specialized models like TurkishBERTweet, TabiBERT achieves +1.47 average improvement, indicating robust cross-domain generalization. We release model weights, training configurations, and evaluation code for transparent, reproducible Turkish encoder research.
title TabiBERT: A Large-Scale ModernBERT Foundation Model and A Unified Benchmark for Turkish
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.23065