This model is a 39.18% smaller version of BAAI/bge-m3 optimized for Afrikaans language via vocabulary size reduction using the trimming method.
This trimmed model should perform similarly to the original model with only 32,768 tokens and a much smaller memory footprint. However, it may not perform well for other languages as tokens not commonly used in the selected languages were removed from the vocabulary.

Model Statistics

Metric	Original	Trimmed	Reduction
Vocabulary size	250,002 tokens	32,768 tokens	86.89%
Model size	567,754,752 params	345,307,136 params	39.18%

Mining Dataset Statistics

Number of texts used for mining: 200,000 texts
Dataset: lbourdois/fineweb-2-trimming

Usage

python

from sentence_transformers import SentenceTransformer
# Download from the 🤗 Hub
model = SentenceTransformer("alphaedge-ai/bge-m3-afr-32768")
# Run inference with queries and documents
query = "My query in Afrikaans"
documents = [
    "Chunk in Afrikaans",
    "Chunk in Afrikaans",
    "Chunk in Afrikaans",
]
query_embeddings = model.encode_query(query)
document_embeddings = model.encode_document(documents)
print(query_embeddings.shape, document_embeddings.shape)
# Compute similarities to determine a ranking
similarities = model.similarity(query_embeddings, document_embeddings)
print(similarities)

Citations

BGE-M3

@misc{bge-m3,
      title={BGE M3-Embedding: Multi-Lingual, Multi-Functionality, Multi-Granularity Text Embeddings Through Self-Knowledge Distillation}, 
      author={Jianlv Chen and Shitao Xiao and Peitian Zhang and Kun Luo and Defu Lian and Zheng Liu},
      year={2024},
      eprint={2402.03216},
      archivePrefix={arXiv},
      primaryClass={cs.CL}
}

Trimming blog post

@misc{hf_blogpost_trimming,
      title={Introduction to Trimming}, 
      author={Loïck BOURDOIS and Tom AARSEN and Bram VANROY and Christopher AKIKI and Woojun JUNG and Manuel ROMERO and Prithiv SAKTHI},
      year={2026},
      url={https://huggingface.co/blog/lbourdois/introduction-to-trimming}, 
}