This model is a 65.49% smaller version of jhu-clsp/mmBERT-small optimized for Afrikaans language via vocabulary size reduction using the trimming method.
This trimmed model should perform similarly to the original model with only 16,384 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	256,000 tokens	16,384 tokens	93.60%
Model size	140,493,696 params	48,481,152 params	65.49%

Mining Dataset Statistics

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

Usage

python

from transformers import AutoModel, AutoTokenizer

model_name = "alphaedge-ai/mmBERT-small-afr-16384"
model = AutoModel.from_pretrained(model_name)
tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained(model_name)

Citations

mmBERT

@misc{marone2025mmbertmodernmultilingualencoder,
      title={mmBERT: A Modern Multilingual Encoder with Annealed Language Learning}, 
      author={Marc Marone and Orion Weller and William Fleshman and Eugene Yang and Dawn Lawrie and Benjamin Van Durme},
      year={2025},
      eprint={2509.06888},
      archivePrefix={arXiv},
      primaryClass={cs.CL},
      url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.06888}, 
}

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}, 
}