This model is a 70.91% smaller version of intfloat/multilingual-e5-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 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	250,037 tokens	32,768 tokens	86.89%
Model size	117,653,760 params	34,222,464 params	70.91%

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/multilingual-e5-small-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

Multilingual E5

@article{wang2024multilingual,
  title={Multilingual E5 Text Embeddings: A Technical Report},
  author={Wang, Liang and Yang, Nan and Huang, Xiaolong and Yang, Linjun and Majumder, Rangan and Wei, Furu},
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2402.05672},
  year={2024}
}

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}, 
}