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---
license: cc-by-nc-4.0
language:
- grc
base_model:
- pranaydeeps/Ancient-Greek-BERT
pipeline_tag: token-classification
tags:
- morphological-tagging
- ancient-greek
- nlp
- universal-dependencies
- low-resource-language
- digital-humanities
metrics:
- accuracy
- f1
datasets:
- proiel
---
# DART-FT: Decomposed, Ambiguity-Aware, Risk-Targeted Fine-Tuning
**DART-FT** is an Ancient Greek fine-grained morphological tagging model and targeted fine-tuning methodology developed as part of a Doctor of Engineering praxis at The George Washington University.
📄 **Full doctoral praxis:**
**[DART-FT: Decomposed, Ambiguity-Aware, Risk-Targeted Fine-Tuning of Transformer Models for Ancient Greek Morphological Tagging](https://scholarspace.library.gwu.edu/etd/4x51hk097)**
DART-FT addresses a specific challenge in low-resource, morphologically rich language modeling: strong fine-tuned transformer models can achieve high aggregate performance while retaining systematic errors concentrated in difficult morphological feature-value patterns.
Rather than broadly retraining the model, DART-FT identifies an empirically defined **high-risk slice** associated with recurrent baseline tagging errors and performs targeted fine-tuning in which training examples associated with the high-risk patterns are selectively oversampled.
Across five random seeds, DART-FT significantly improved fine-grained morphological tagging accuracy on the predefined high-risk slice relative to corresponding standard cross-entropy fine-tuned Ancient-Greek-BERT baselines. The best-performing configuration improved high-risk-slice accuracy by **6.4 percentage points**, from **63.4% to 69.9%** (**p < .001**), while global macro-F1 showed no observed degradation.
## Model Details
- **Developed by:** Matthew K. Weber
- **Model:** DART-FT
- **Model type:** BERT encoder with decomposed morphological classification heads
- **Base model:** [`pranaydeeps/Ancient-Greek-BERT`](https://huggingface.co/pranaydeeps/Ancient-Greek-BERT)
- **Language:** Ancient Greek (`grc`)
- **Primary task:** Fine-grained morphological tagging
- **Framework:** PyTorch / Hugging Face Transformers
- **Dataset:** UD Ancient Greek PROIEL v2.12
- **Doctoral program:** Doctor of Engineering, The George Washington University
- **Praxis:** [Full text in GW ScholarSpace](https://scholarspace.library.gwu.edu/etd/4x51hk097)
## What DART-FT Predicts
DART-FT predicts fine-grained morphology using **decomposed classification** rather than treating every complete morphological bundle as a single class.
The released schema contains a UPOS head and separate heads for 15 Universal Dependencies morphological attributes:
- UPOS
- Case
- Gender
- Number
- Definite
- PronType
- Aspect
- Tense
- VerbForm
- Voice
- Degree
- Mood
- Person
- Polarity
- Reflex
- Poss
Individual predictions can then be reconstructed into a complete fine-grained morphological representation such as:
```text
NOUN|Case=Acc|Gender=Masc|Number=Sing
```
This decomposition is intended to reduce the data-sparsity problems that arise when every possible combination of morphological features is represented as an independent class.
---
# DART-FT Methodology
DART-FT combines three principal ideas:
1. **Decomposed morphological classification**
2. **Empirical identification of a high-risk slice**
3. **Risk-targeted fine-tuning through oversampling**
## 1. Decomposed Morphological Classification
Instead of representing a complete FEATS bundle as one classification label, DART-FT decomposes each bundle into individual morphological attributes for independent per-feature classification.
For example:
```text
Case=Nom
Gender=Masc
Number=Sing
```
are modeled as separate classification decisions.
The model additionally predicts UPOS.
This architecture reduces sparsity associated with treating the full Cartesian combination of morphological attributes as distinct labels.
## 2. Empirical High-Risk Slice Identification
The **high-risk slice is not a predefined dictionary of difficult Ancient Greek words**.
Instead, it is identified empirically from recurrent errors made by a standard fine-tuned Ancient-Greek-BERT baseline.
The methodology uses a **three-pass process**.
### Pass 1 — Error-Driven Mining
The baseline model predicts morphological labels on the validation set. Predicted feature-value pairs are compared with gold labels to identify recurrent error patterns.
### Pass 2 — Feature-Value Filtering and Diversity Constraint
Candidate feature-value pairs are filtered to isolate sufficiently frequent and systematic error patterns while preventing a small number of broad categories from dominating the high-risk slice.
### Pass 3 — Slice Freezing and Mask Creation
The resulting feature-value definition is frozen. A mask based on this frozen definition is then applied to held-out test data for consistent evaluation across models.
The validation set is used to define the high-risk slice so that the test set remains held out from training and model-selection activities.
Although morphological ambiguity motivates DART-FT, membership in the high-risk slice is determined by **observed model error behavior at the feature-value level**, rather than lexical identity alone.
## 3. Risk-Targeted Fine-Tuning
After the high-risk feature-value patterns are identified, DART-FT performs an additional stage of targeted fine-tuning.
Training sentences containing tokens associated with the high-risk patterns are selectively **oversampled**, increasing model exposure to those difficult cases while preserving sentence-level context.
The research evaluated:
- oversampling factors of **2x, 3x, and 4x**
- five random seeds
- cross-entropy loss
- class-balanced loss
- class-balanced + focal loss
- multiple class-balanced β values
- multiple focal-loss γ values
A total of **90 distinct experimental models** were evaluated.
---
# Released Model Configuration
The model artifact in this repository corresponds to the highest-performing DART-FT configuration evaluated in the research:
- **Random seed:** 43
- **Oversampling factor:** 3x
- **Loss:** Class-balanced
- **β:** 0.993
- **Learning rate:** 3 × 10⁻⁵
- **Batch size:** 8
- **Training epochs:** 5
- **Maximum sequence length:** 512
- **Optimizer:** AdamW
- **Weight decay:** 0.01
- **Dropout:** 0.1
- **Mixed precision:** FP16
The repository includes the fine-tuned Ancient-Greek-BERT encoder and separately stored decomposed classification heads.
Important files include:
```text
model.safetensors
heads.pt
schema.json
meta.json
test_pred.conllu
```
### Repository Components
**`model.safetensors`**
Fine-tuned transformer encoder weights.
**`heads.pt`**
Trained decomposed morphological classification heads.
**`schema.json`**
Label inventory for UPOS and each morphological feature head.
**`meta.json`**
Metadata describing the released experimental configuration.
**`test_pred.conllu`**
Model predictions in CoNLL-U-compatible form.
---
# Training and Evaluation Data
DART-FT was trained and evaluated using the **Universal Dependencies Ancient Greek PROIEL treebank, version 2.12**.
The pre-existing PROIEL train, validation, and test splits were preserved.
| Split | Sentences | Tokens | UPOS Tags | UFEATS Attributes |
|---|---:|---:|---:|---:|
| Train | 15,016 | 187,039 | 13 | 15 |
| Dev / Validation | 1,019 | 13,652 | 13 | 15 |
| Test | 1,047 | 13,314 | 13 | 15 |
| **Total** | **17,082** | **214,005** | **13** | **15** |
The Ancient Greek PROIEL corpus used in the study includes the **27 books of the Ancient Greek New Testament and portions of Herodotus**.
The New Testament portion of PROIEL itself contains approximately **140,000 tokens**. This should not be confused with the full experimental dataset, which contains **214,005 tokens across the train, validation, and test splits**.
---
# Tokenization and Label Alignment
DART-FT uses the WordPiece tokenization employed by BERT.
Because one source word can be divided into multiple subword tokens:
- the **first subword** receives the corresponding UPOS and morphological labels;
- subsequent subwords are **excluded from the classification loss**.
This prevents a word that is split into multiple WordPieces from contributing duplicate morphological training labels and promotes learning at the word level.
---
# Evaluation
DART-FT was evaluated from two complementary perspectives:
1. **Fine-grained morphological accuracy on the high-risk slice**
2. **Global macro-F1**
## High-Risk Exact-Match Accuracy
Fine-grained accuracy uses the complete morphological prediction for a word.
The prediction must match the corresponding gold morphological representation for the token; partial corrections do not count as an exact match.
## Macro-F1
Macro-F1 gives classes equal weight rather than allowing highly frequent morphological categories to dominate the evaluation.
Global macro-F1 was used specifically to evaluate whether targeted intervention on the high-risk slice caused broader model degradation.
## Statistical Testing
Paired baseline and DART-FT predictions were evaluated using the **exact two-sided McNemar test**.
Confidence intervals were also calculated for the paired accuracy differences.
---
# Results
## High-Risk Slice Performance
For the highest-performing DART-FT model associated with each random seed:
| Seed | Baseline Accuracy | DART-FT Accuracy | Change | p-value |
|---:|---:|---:|---:|---:|
| 41 | 59.3% | 63.9% | +4.5 pp | < .001 |
| 42 | 65.6% | 70.7% | +5.2 pp | .003 |
| 43 | 63.4% | 69.9% | **+6.4 pp** | **< .001** |
| 44 | 57.5% | 63.2% | +5.7 pp | < .001 |
| 45 | 64.5% | 69.8% | +5.3 pp | < .001 |
The largest observed improvement was produced by **seed 43, 3x oversampling, class-balanced loss, β = 0.993**:
```text
Baseline high-risk accuracy: 63.4%
DART-FT high-risk accuracy: 69.9%
Absolute improvement: +6.4 percentage points
p-value: < .001
95% confidence interval: 3.38–9.14 pp
```
All five seed comparisons exhibited statistically significant increases in high-risk-slice accuracy.
## Global Model Stability
Targeted fine-tuning did **not** produce an observed decrease in global macro-F1 for any of the five random seeds.
| Seed | Baseline Global Macro-F1 | DART-FT Global Macro-F1 | Change |
|---:|---:|---:|---:|
| 41 | 0.921 | 0.939 | +0.018 |
| 42 | 0.919 | 0.940 | +0.021 |
| 43 | 0.917 | 0.939 | +0.022 |
| 44 | 0.919 | 0.938 | +0.019 |
| 45 | 0.920 | 0.937 | +0.017 |
The mean global macro-F1 improvement was **+0.0194**.
These results support the central DART-FT objective: targeted repair of systematic fine-grained morphological tagging errors without observed degradation of overall model performance.
## Error Analysis
Error analysis showed that targeted fine-tuning corrected recurring errors across multiple morphological features.
A particularly strong effect was observed for the `Gender=Masc,Neut` feature-value pair, where the standard baseline frequently predicted one of the more common individual gender categories rather than the syncretic `Masc,Neut` value.
The research also identified localized regressions in some tightly coupled features, demonstrating that targeted fine-tuning can introduce tradeoffs even when aggregate high-risk and global performance improve.
---
# Oversampling Sensitivity
DART-FT explicitly evaluated whether performance was sensitive to the amount of high-risk oversampling.
The tested oversampling factors were:
```text
2x
3x
4x
```
Performance varied across seeds and configurations.
Across the experiments, intermediate oversampling generally produced the strongest mean improvement, and the highest-performing individual configuration used **3x oversampling**.
This supports the conclusion that targeted fine-tuning effectiveness depends on the strength of the intervention and that simply maximizing oversampling is not necessarily optimal.
---
# Intended Uses
## Fine-Grained Ancient Greek Morphological Tagging
DART-FT can support prediction of grammatical information including:
- part of speech
- case
- gender
- number
- tense
- mood
- voice
- person
- aspect
- degree
- pronoun type
- definiteness
- polarity
- reflexivity
- possession
## Digital Humanities
Potential applications include automated annotation and analysis of Ancient Greek corpora, including historical and biblical texts.
## NLP Pipelines
Fine-grained morphological predictions may provide structured linguistic information for downstream tasks such as:
- syntactic parsing
- corpus analysis
- information extraction
- search
- experimental machine translation workflows
Downstream benefits should be independently evaluated for each application.
## Research on Targeted Model Repair
DART-FT may also be useful as an example of **error-driven targeted fine-tuning**.
The broader methodology identifies a reproducible model weakness through validation-set behavior and selectively increases exposure to corresponding training examples rather than indiscriminately increasing training across the entire corpus.
---
# Downstream Translation Pilot
The praxis also included a small-scale exploratory Ancient Greek-to-Latin translation pilot.
The pilot compared morphological information produced by the DART-FT model with the corresponding baseline model when supplied to a downstream translation system.
The results provided limited evidence of downstream improvement:
- **chrF++:** +0.24, p = 0.0408
- **TER:** 59.42 → 59.27
- for the subset in which baseline and DART-FT morphological sequences differed (`N = 232`), chrF++ improved by +0.37 and TER decreased by 0.23
This pilot was **secondary and exploratory**. DART-FT should not be interpreted as a production machine-translation system, and the translation results should not be generalized beyond the limited experiment.
---
# Limitations
## Corpus Scope
DART-FT was trained and evaluated on the Ancient Greek PROIEL treebank, consisting principally of New Testament Greek and portions of Herodotus.
Performance should not be assumed to transfer unchanged to:
- Homeric Greek
- Classical Attic Greek
- Septuagint Greek
- papyri
- inscriptions
- patristic Greek
- Byzantine Greek
- other Ancient Greek treebanks or annotation schemes
## Generalizability
Generalizability of the methodology to other languages and domains is plausible but was **not empirically validated** in the praxis.
Applying DART-FT to another problem requires, at minimum:
- a gold-labeled dataset with token-level annotations;
- a pretrained model capable of task-specific fine-tuning; and
- a finite, decomposable feature set suitable for identifying systematic feature-level errors.
## High-Risk Slice Definition
The high-risk slice is empirically defined and depends on methodological thresholds selected during the research.
Different thresholds or filtering rules may result in different high-risk populations.
## Model Dependence
The high-risk slice reflects weaknesses exhibited by a particular model and dataset.
Different pretrained models, datasets, or annotation systems may produce different concentrations of errors.
## Oversampling Tradeoffs
Oversampling increases model exposure to difficult examples but can also increase the risk of overfitting or localized negative transfer.
DART-FT therefore treats oversampling strength as a hyperparameter rather than assuming that greater oversampling will always yield greater performance.
---
# How to Use
> **Important:** The released DART-FT repository is not packaged as a conventional single-head Hugging Face `AutoModelForTokenClassification` checkpoint.
DART-FT uses a BERT encoder plus **separately stored decomposed morphological classification heads**.
Therefore, a call such as:
```python
AutoModelForTokenClassification.from_pretrained("zootsewt/DART-FT")
```
does **not by itself reproduce the complete DART-FT inference architecture**.
The transformer encoder and tokenizer can be loaded with:
```python
from transformers import AutoTokenizer, AutoModel
model_name = "zootsewt/DART-FT"
tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained(model_name)
encoder = AutoModel.from_pretrained(model_name)
```
The decomposed classification heads stored in:
```text
heads.pt
```
must also be loaded and applied according to the label inventory in:
```text
schema.json
```
The individual head predictions are then combined to reconstruct a complete fine-grained morphological analysis for each source token.
A reference inference wrapper may be provided in a future repository update to automate loading of the encoder, classification heads, schema, token alignment, and output reconstruction.
---
# Research Context
DART-FT was developed as the principal research contribution of the Doctor of Engineering praxis:
** _DART-FT: Decomposed, Ambiguity-Aware, Risk-Targeted Fine-Tuning of Transformer Models for Ancient Greek Morphological Tagging._ The George Washington University.**
### Read the full praxis
**https://scholarspace.library.gwu.edu/etd/4x51hk097**
---
# Citation
If you use DART-FT or the associated methodology in academic work, please cite the doctoral praxis:
```bibtex
@phdthesis{weber2026dartft,
author = {Weber, Matthew K.},
title = {DART-FT: Decomposed, Ambiguity-Aware, Risk-Targeted Fine-Tuning of Transformer Models for Ancient Greek Morphological Tagging},
school = {The George Washington University},
year = {2026},
type = {Doctor of Engineering Praxis},
url = {https://scholarspace.library.gwu.edu/etd/4x51hk097}
}
```
**Praxis:**
https://scholarspace.library.gwu.edu/etd/4x51hk097
---
# Disclaimer
DART-FT is a research artifact developed and evaluated within the scope of a Doctor of Engineering praxis.
Reported results reflect the specific datasets, baseline model, experimental design, high-risk slice definition, hyperparameters, and evaluation methods used in that research.
Results should not be assumed to generalize unchanged to other corpora, models, languages, annotation systems, or downstream applications.