---
license: apache-2.0
language: de
library_name: transformers
tags:
  - token-classification
  - named-entity-recognition
  - german
  - xlm-roberta
  - peft
  - lora
---

# 🇩🇪 GermaNER: Adapter-Based NER for German using XLM-RoBERTa

<center><img src="assets/ner_logo.png" alt="NER Logo" width="200" style="margin-bottom:-90px;"/></center>

## 🔍 Overview

**GermaNER** is a high-performance Named Entity Recognition (NER) model built on top of `xlm-roberta-large` and fine-tuned using the [PEFT](https://github.com/huggingface/peft) framework with **LoRA adapters**. It supports 7 entity classes using the BIO tagging scheme and is optimized for both in-domain and general-domain German texts.

> This model is lightweight (adapter-only) and requires attaching the LoRA adapter to the base model for inference.

---

## 🧠 Architecture

- **Base model**: [`xlm-roberta-large`](https://huggingface.co/xlm-roberta-large)
- **Fine-tuning**: Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) using [LoRA](https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.09685)
- **Adapter config**:
  - `r=16`, `alpha=32`, `dropout=0.1`
  - LoRA applied to: `query`, `key`, `value` projection layers
- **Max sequence length**: 128 tokens
- **Mixed-precision training**: (fp16)
- **Training samples**: 44,000 sentences

---

## 🏷️ Label Schema

The model uses the standard BIO format with the following 7 labels:

| Label     | Description                       |
|-----------|-----------------------------------|
| `O`       | Outside any named entity          |
| `B-PER`   | Beginning of a person entity      |
| `I-PER`   | Inside a person entity            |
| `B-ORG`   | Beginning of an organization      |
| `I-ORG`   | Inside an organization            |
| `B-LOC`   | Beginning of a location entity    |
| `I-LOC`   | Inside a location entity          |

### 🗂️ Training-Set Concatenation  
The model was trained on a **concatenated corpus** of GermEval 2014 and WikiANN-de:

| Split | Sentences |
|-------|-----------|
| **Training** | **44 000** |
| **Evaluation** | **15 100** |

The datasets were token-aligned to the BIO scheme and merged before shuffling, ensuring a balanced distribution of domain-specific (news & Wikipedia) entity mentions across both splits.

## 🚀 Getting Started

This model uses **adapter-based inference**, not a full model. Use `peft` to attach the adapter weights.

```python
from transformers import AutoTokenizer, AutoModelForTokenClassification, pipeline
from peft import PeftModel, PeftConfig

model_id = "fau/GermaNER"

# Define label mappings
label_names = ["O", "B-PER", "I-PER", "B-ORG", "I-ORG", "B-LOC", "I-LOC"]
label2id = {label: idx for idx, label in enumerate(label_names)}
id2label = {idx: label for idx, label in enumerate(label_names)}

# Load tokenizer
tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained(model_id, token=True)

# Load PEFT adapter config
peft_config = PeftConfig.from_pretrained(model_id, token=True)

# Load base model with label mappings
base_model = AutoModelForTokenClassification.from_pretrained(
    peft_config.base_model_name_or_path,
    num_labels=len(label_names),
    id2label=id2label,
    label2id=label2id,
    token=True
)

# Attach adapter
model = PeftModel.from_pretrained(base_model, model_id, token=True)

# Create pipeline
ner_pipe = pipeline("ner", model=model, tokenizer=tokenizer, aggregation_strategy="simple")

# Run inference
text = "Angela Merkel war Bundeskanzlerin von Deutschland."
entities = ner_pipe(text)

for ent in entities:
    print(f"{ent['word']} → {ent['entity_group']} (score: {ent['score']:.2f})")
```

## Files & Structure  
File | Description
---- | -----------
adapter_model.safetensors | LoRA adapter weights  
adapter_config.json | PEFT config for the adapter  
tokenizer.json | Tokenizer for XLM-Roberta  
sentencepiece.bpe.model | SentencePiece model file  
special_tokens_map.json | Special tokens config  
tokenizer_config.json | Tokenizer settings  

## 💡 Open-Source Use Cases (Hugging Face)

- **Streaming news pipelines** – Deploy `transformers` NER via the `pipeline("ner")` API inside a Kafka → Faust stream-processor. Emit annotated JSON to OpenSearch/Elastic and visualise in Kibana dashboards—all built from OSS components.

- **Parliament analytics** – Load Bundestag & Länder transcripts with `datasets.load_dataset`, tag entities in batch with a `TokenClassificationPipeline`, then export triples to Neo4j via the OSS `graphdatascience` driver and expose them through a GraphQL layer.

- **Biomedical text mining** – Ingest open German clinical-trial registries (e.g. from Hugging Face Hub) into Spark; call the NER model on RDD partitions to extract drug-gene-disease mentions, feeding a downstream pharmacovigilance workflow—entirely with Apache-licensed libraries.

- **Conversational AI** – Attach the LoRA adapter with `PeftModel` and serve through the HF `text-classification-inference` server. Connect to Rasa 3 (open source) using the HTTPIntentClassifier for real-time slot-filling and context hand-off in German customer-support chatbots.


📜 License  
This model is licensed under the Apache 2.0 License.

For questions, reach out on GitHub or Hugging Face 🤝
---

Open source contributions are welcome via:
- A `demo.ipynb` notebook
- An evaluation script using `seqeval`
- A `gr.Interface` or Streamlit demo for public inference