Mursit-Large is a large-scale Turkish Masked Language Model pre-trained entirely from scratch on Turkish-dominant corpora. The model is based on ModernBERT-large architecture (403M parameters) and serves as a foundation model for downstream tasks. Unlike domain-adaptive approaches that continue training from existing checkpoints, this model is initialized randomly and trained on a carefully curated dataset combining Turkish legal text with general web data.
Key Features:
Pre-trained from scratch on approximately 112.7 billion tokens of Turkish-dominant corpus
Achieves 60.76% MLM accuracy on Turkish datasets (80-10-10 masking strategy, evaluated at 15% masking rate)
Serves as foundation for downstream embedding tasks (Mursit-Large-TR-Retrieval)
Custom tokenizer optimized for Turkish morphological structure
Pre-trained with 30% masking rate (ModernBERT/RoBERTa approach) but evaluated at 15% masking rate for fair comparison
Model Type: Masked Language Model (MLM) Parameters: 403M Base Architecture: ModernBERT-large Hidden Size: 1,024 Max Sequence Length: 2,048 tokens
Architecture Details
Layers: 28 transformer layers
Hidden Size: 1,024
FFN Size: 2,624
Attention Heads: 16 heads with 64 dimensions each
Activation: GeGLU (Gated Linear Units with GELU)
Normalization: RMSNorm
Position Embeddings: Rotary positional embeddings (RoPE) with θ=20,000
Window Size: 128
Vocabulary Size: 59,008 tokens
Training Details
Pre-training:
Dataset: Turkish-dominant corpus totaling approximately 112.7 billion tokens
Legal Sources:
Court of Cassation (Yargıtay): 10.3M sequences, ~3.43B tokens
Council of State (Danıştay): 151K sequences, ~0.11B tokens
MLM Accuracy Scores (80-10-10 Strategy) on Turkish Datasets
The following table presents MLM accuracy scores (averaged across the 80-10-10 strategy) for our pre-trained models and baseline MLM models evaluated on Turkish datasets. This model's results are highlighted in italics.
Model
MLM Avg (%)
boun-tabilab/TabiBERT
69.57
newmindai/Mursit-Large
67.25
ytu-ce-cosmos/turkish-large-bert-cased
65.03
dbmdz/bert-base-turkish-cased
64.98
newmindai/Mursit-Base
64.05
KocLab-Bilkent/BERTurk-Legal
54.10
ytu-ce-cosmos/turkish-base-bert-uncased
52.69
MLM accuracy averaged across the 80-10-10 masking strategy. Evaluation datasets: blackerx/turkish_v2, fthbrmnby/turkish_product_reviews, hazal/Turkish-Biomedical-corpus-trM, newmindai/EuroHPC-Legal. All experiments are reproducible (see Section A.2 in the paper).
Performance on MTEB-Turkish Benchmark
The following visualization shows the model's performance compared to other Turkish language models:
Model Performance Comparison
Model Performance Comparison: Legal Score vs. MTEB Score. MLM models (blue circles) form a distinct cluster. Mursit-Large achieves competitive performance among Turkish MLM models.
This model was evaluated on the comprehensive MTEB-Turkish benchmark for embedding tasks using mean pooling over token representations followed by L2 normalization.
Comprehensive Benchmark Results
The following table presents comprehensive evaluation results across all models evaluated on the MTEB-Turkish benchmark. This model's results are highlighted in italics.
Model
MTEB
Legal
Cls.
Clus.
Pair
Ret.
STS
Cont.
Reg.
Case
Params
Type
embeddinggemma-300m
65.42
50.63
77.74
45.05
80.02
55.06
69.22
83.97
39.56
28.38
307M
Emb.
bge-m3
62.87
51.16
75.35
35.86
78.88
54.42
69.83
86.08
38.09
29.3
567M
Emb.
Mursit-Embed-Qwen3-1.7B-TR
56.84
34.76
68.46
42.22
59.67
50.1
63.77
70.22
17.94
16.11
1.7B
CLM-E.
Mursit-Large-TR-Retrieval
56.87
46.56
67.72
41.15
59.78
51.69
64.01
81.78
32.67
25.24
403M
Emb.
Mursit-Base-TR-Retrieval
55.86
47.52
66.25
39.75
61.31
50.07
61.9
80.4
34.1
28.07
155M
Emb.
Mursit-Embed-Qwen3-4B-TR
53.65
37.0
67.29
36.68
58.36
51.12
54.77
69.25
24.21
17.56
4B
CLM-E.
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bert-base-turkish-uncased
46.23
24.94
68.05
33.81
60.44
32.01
36.85
52.47
12.05
10.29
110M
MLM
turkish-large-bert-cased
45.3
19.12
67.43
34.24
60.11
28.68
36.04
47.57
5.93
3.85
337M
MLM
bert-base-turkish-cased
45.17
24.41
66.39
35.28
60.05
30.52
33.62
54.03
10.13
9.07
110M
MLM
BERTurk-Legal
42.02
32.63
60.61
26.24
59.51
25.8
37.94
61.4
15.51
20.99
184M
MLM
Mursit-Large
41.75
23.71
62.95
25.34
58.04
27.4
35.01
42.74
11.29
17.1
403M
MLM
turkish-base-bert-uncased
44.68
27.58
66.22
30.23
58.84
31.4
36.74
56.6
13.39
12.74
110M
MLM
Mursit-Base
40.23
17.93
59.78
25.48
58.65
20.82
36.45
36.0
7.4
10.4
155M
MLM
mmBERT-base
39.65
12.15
61.84
26.77
59.25
15.83
34.56
34.45
1.33
0.68
306M
MLM
TabiBERT
37.77
11.5
59.63
25.75
58.19
14.96
30.32
32.02
1.86
0.63
148M
MLM
ModernBERT-base
23.8
2.99
39.06
2.01
53.95
2.1
21.91
7.92
0.62
0.43
149M
MLM
ModernBERT-large
23.74
2.44
39.44
3.9
53.73
1.8
19.85
6.12
0.62
0.59
394M
MLM
Column abbreviations: MTEB = mean performance across task types; Legal = weighted average of Contracts, Regulation, Caselaw; Classification = accuracy on Turkish classification tasks; Clustering = V-measure on clustering tasks; Pair Classification = average precision on pair classification tasks like NLI; Retrieval = nDCG@10 on information retrieval tasks; Semantic Textual Similarity = Spearman correlation; Contracts = nDCG@10 on legal contract retrieval; Regulation = nDCG@10 on regulatory text retrieval; Caselaw = nDCG@10 on case law retrieval; Number of Parameters = number of model parameters; Model Type = model type (Embedding, CLM-Embedding, Masked Language Model). Bold values indicate the highest score in each column.
Key Findings:
The model shows substantial improvement over ModernBERT baselines (which are monolingual English models), validating the effectiveness of Turkish-specific pre-training
Pre-training alone without embedding-specific fine-tuning yields limited utility for retrieval tasks
Language-specific pre-training is critical, as monolingual English models show limited cross-lingual transfer to Turkish
The model demonstrates that improvements in MLM accuracy do not always directly translate to better downstream task performance
MLM vs Downstream Performance Analysis
The following visualization shows the relationship between MLM validation loss and downstream retrieval performance:
MLM vs Downstream Performance
Relationship between MLM validation loss and downstream retrieval performance across ModernBERT-large versions. This analysis demonstrates how improvements in MLM accuracy correlate with downstream task performance.
Note: This model is primarily designed for Masked Language Modeling tasks. Embedding performance is provided for reference using standard mean pooling. For optimal retrieval performance, consider using the post-trained retrieval variants (Mursit-Base-TR-Retrieval or Mursit-Large-TR-Retrieval).
Reproducibility
To reproduce the MLM benchmark results for this model, please refer to:
MLM Benchmark Results:github.com/newmindai/mecellem-models/benchmark/mlm - Contains code and evaluation configurations for reproducing MLM accuracy scores on Turkish datasets using the 80-10-10 masking strategy.
1import numpy as np
2import onnxruntime as ort
3from transformers import AutoTokenizer
4from huggingface_hub import hf_hub_download
56repo_id ="newmindai/Mursit-Large"78onnx_path = hf_hub_download(repo_id,"model.onnx")910tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained(repo_id)1112sess = ort.InferenceSession(13 onnx_path,14 providers=["CUDAExecutionProvider","CPUExecutionProvider"]15)1617text =f"Bu bir {tokenizer.mask_token} cümledir."18inputs = tokenizer(text, return_tensors="np")1920outputs = sess.run(None,dict(inputs))21logits = outputs[0]2223mask_pos = np.where(inputs["input_ids"][0]== tokenizer.mask_token_id)[0][0]24mask_logits = logits[0, mask_pos]2526top_k =527top_k_ids = np.argsort(mask_logits)[-top_k:][::-1]28predictions = tokenizer.convert_ids_to_tokens(top_k_ids)2930print("MASK predictions:")31for p in predictions:32print(p)
Features
Automatic GPU/CPU selection: Uses CUDA if available, otherwise falls back to CPU
Hugging Face integration: Downloads model files directly from Hugging Face Hub
Masked token prediction: Predicts the most likely tokens for masked positions
Top-K predictions: Returns the top K most probable token predictions
Use Cases
Turkish language understanding tasks
Text classification
Named entity recognition
Question answering
Feature extraction for downstream tasks
Acknowledgments
This work was supported by the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking through project etur46 with access to the MareNostrum 5 supercomputer, hosted by Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC), Spain. MareNostrum 5 is owned by EuroHPC JU and operated by BSC. We are grateful to the BSC support team for their assistance with job scheduling, environment configuration, and technical guidance throughout the project.
The numerical calculations reported in this work were fully/partially performed at TÜBİTAK ULAKBİM, High Performance and Grid Computing Center (TRUBA resources). The authors gratefully acknowledge the know-how provided by the MINERVA Support for expert guidance and collaboration opportunities in HPC-AI integration.
References
If you use this model, please cite our paper:
bibtex
1@article{mecellem2026,
2 title={Mecellem Models: Turkish Models Trained from Scratch and Continually Pre-trained for the Legal Domain},
3 author={Uğur, Özgür and Göksu, Mahmut and Çimen, Mahmut and Yılmaz, Musa and Şavirdi, Esra and Demir, Alp Talha and Güllüce, Rumeysa and İclal Çetin and Ömer Can Sağbaş},
4 journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2601.16018},
5 year={2026},
6 month={January},
7 url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.16018},
8 doi={10.48550/arXiv.2601.16018},
9 eprint={2601.16018},
10 archivePrefix={arXiv},
11 primaryClass={cs.CL}
12}
Base Model References
bibtex
1@inproceedings{modernbert2025,
2 title={ModernBERT: A Modern Bidirectional Encoder Transformer},
3 author={Answer.AI and LightOn},
4 booktitle={Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Language Models},
5 year={2025}
6}