---
language:
- pcm
- en
tags:
- transformers
- encoder-decoder
- gpt2
- pidgin
- nigerian-pidgin
- nlp
- text-generation
library_name: transformers
---

# Pidgin14 Decoder (GPT-2-medium-based)

## Overview

This repository hosts the **decoder-side tokenizer** for `pidgin14`, an encoder-decoder sequence-to-sequence system for Nigerian Pidgin English ("Naija") built by [Ephraim](https://huggingface.co/Ephraimmm) at Analytics Intelligence.

`pidgin14` is composed of two halves published as separate repositories:
- **Encoder** — [`Ephraimmm/pidgin14-encoder`](https://huggingface.co/Ephraimmm/pidgin14-encoder), based on AfriBERTa, reads source text and produces contextual representations.
- **Decoder** (this repo) — based on GPT-2-medium, consumes the encoder's representations via cross-attention and generates the output text.

The two halves are combined and trained together as a single `EncoderDecoderModel`, whose full weights are published at [`Ephraimmm/pidgin14`](https://huggingface.co/Ephraimmm/pidgin14). The architecture facts below are taken directly from that combined model's `config.json` (`decoder` sub-config), since this component repository itself contains only tokenizer files (`tokenizer.json`, `tokenizer_config.json`, `special_tokens_map.json`, `vocab.json`, `merges.txt`) and not a standalone `config.json` or weight file.

## Architecture Details

From the `decoder` sub-configuration of the combined `Ephraimmm/pidgin14` model:

| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Base model | `gpt2-medium` |
| Model type | `gpt2` (architecture class `GPT2LMHeadModel`), configured with `add_cross_attention: true` so it can act as the decoder half of an `EncoderDecoderModel` |
| Layers (`n_layer`) | 24 |
| Hidden size (`n_embd`) | 1024 |
| Attention heads (`n_head`) | 16 |
| Context length (`n_positions` / `n_ctx`) | 1024 |
| Vocabulary size | 50,257 |
| Activation function | `gelu_new` |

Tokenizer shipped in **this** repository:
- Tokenizer class: `GPT2Tokenizer` (byte-level BPE)
- Vocabulary size: 50,257 tokens (`vocab.json` with 50,000 merge rules in `merges.txt`) — this matches the standard, unmodified GPT-2 tokenizer vocabulary rather than a Pidgin-specific retrained vocabulary.
- Special token: `<|endoftext|>` used as bos/eos/pad/unk (token id 50256).
- `decoder_start_token_id`: 50256 (per the combined model's config).

## Training Details

- Fine-tuned from: `gpt2-medium`, used as the decoder half of the `pidgin14` `EncoderDecoderModel` (with cross-attention layers added to attend to the encoder's outputs).
- Framework: Hugging Face `transformers` (the combined model's config records `transformers_version: 4.44.2`).
- Stored precision: `float32` (per the combined model's config).
- No `trainer_state.json`, training-step/epoch counts, optimizer settings, or training-dataset identifiers are published in this repository or in the combined `Ephraimmm/pidgin14` repository. These details are therefore omitted rather than estimated.

## Intended Use

- Generating Nigerian Pidgin English and/or English text as the second stage of the `pidgin14` sequence-to-sequence pipeline (e.g. translation, paraphrasing, conversational response generation).
- Research and experimentation on low-resource West African language NLP.
- Must be paired with the [`pidgin14-encoder`](https://huggingface.co/Ephraimmm/pidgin14-encoder) tokenizer and the trained weights in [`Ephraimmm/pidgin14`](https://huggingface.co/Ephraimmm/pidgin14) to produce output.

## How to Use

```python
from transformers import AutoTokenizer, EncoderDecoderModel

# Tokenizers for each half of the system
encoder_tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained("Ephraimmm/pidgin14-encoder")
decoder_tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained("Ephraimmm/pidgin14-decoder")

# The trained combined encoder-decoder weights
model = EncoderDecoderModel.from_pretrained("Ephraimmm/pidgin14")

text = "How you dey?"
inputs = encoder_tokenizer(text, return_tensors="pt")

output_ids = model.generate(
    **inputs,
    decoder_start_token_id=decoder_tokenizer.bos_token_id,
    max_length=50,
)
print(decoder_tokenizer.decode(output_ids[0], skip_special_tokens=True))
```

## Limitations

- This repository provides the **tokenizer only** for the decoder half of `pidgin14`; it is not a usable standalone model and contains no weight file or `config.json` of its own.
- Must be paired with [`Ephraimmm/pidgin14-encoder`](https://huggingface.co/Ephraimmm/pidgin14-encoder) and the weights in [`Ephraimmm/pidgin14`](https://huggingface.co/Ephraimmm/pidgin14) to perform any task.
- The tokenizer vocabulary is the stock GPT-2 (English-oriented) byte-level BPE vocabulary and was not retrained on Pidgin-specific text, which may reduce tokenization efficiency for Pidgin-specific spellings and slang.
- Nigerian Pidgin English is a low-resource language with substantial dialectal and orthographic variation; outputs should be reviewed for fluency and correctness before use.
- No evaluation metrics, benchmark results, or training-dataset documentation are published for this model. Outputs should be independently validated before any production use.
- License terms are not specified in the repository; users should contact the author before commercial reuse.

## Author

Developed by [Ephraimmm](https://huggingface.co/Ephraimmm)