Belaid-31M

Punctuation and capitalisation for Kabyle (Taqbaylit, kab, Latin script). It reads an unpunctuated, uncased Kabyle sentence — the form every speech recogniser produces — and predicts, for each word, which mark follows it and whether it takes a capital.

It restores marks at 0.793 macro-F1 and non-initial proper nouns at 0.933, and it returns 86.3% of held-out sentences exactly right, marks and capitals both, against 59.2% for the rule that a system without a model uses. It is, as far as we can establish, the first punctuation and casing restoration model published for Kabyle, or for any Berber language.

It is built for agbalu/Fadhma-300M, whose CTC vocabulary holds 40 characters and no punctuation at all, and it is a fine-tune of agbalu/Masinissa-31M.

It never edits spelling. Words come back exactly as they went in, so it cannot introduce a transcription error into text the recogniser got right — the failure mode that rules out a generative post-processor for a language whose corpus this output feeds.

Results

Scored against a rule baseline that capitalises the first word and appends a period. On read speech that is not a weak opponent: it gets the sentence-final mark right 83.7% of the time, because most sentences do end in a full stop.

Common Voice test — 5,160 sentences, 26,969 words

Question marks are the clearest result: 0.898 F1 where the baseline scores 0.000, because Kabyle marks interrogatives lexically — acu, anida, amek, melmi — and the encoder reads them. Capitalisation of names inside a sentence goes the same way, 0.933 from a floor of zero.

COLON's 0.602 rests on 43 examples and carries one fifth of the macro. On the out-of-domain split's 13,544 it is 0.721. Quote the macro with that support named, or quote the four-class figure.

Out of domain — 45,028 records of long-form prose, 1,000,928 words

A source held out of training entirely, and a different shape of text: Common Voice records are one sentence each, these average 22 words across several.

The absolute figure falls, and the margin over the baseline widens — 3.8× here against 3.5× on test — because the rule degrades faster on multi-sentence text than the model does. Both numbers are reported because a model evaluated only in its training domain has not been evaluated.

Intended use

Putting punctuation and capitals back onto text that has none: the output of Fadhma-300M or any other Kabyle speech recogniser, subtitle and caption tracks, and lowercased corpus text being prepared for reading rather than for training.

One utterance at a time is what it was fitted on. The training split is Common Voice, where every record is a single sentence, and that is the shape the 0.793 above measures.

Not suitable for: segmenting a paragraph or a book page into sentences — it restores marks, not boundaries, and the out-of-domain numbers above are what that costs; any decision about a person; or any language other than Kabyle.

Usage

transformers and torch, nothing else. The architecture is not one of the library's own, so the modelling code travels in this repository and trust_remote_code=True is what loads it.

from transformers import AutoModelForTokenClassification, AutoTokenizer

model = AutoModelForTokenClassification.from_pretrained(
    "agbalu/Belaid-31M", trust_remote_code=True
).eval()
tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained("agbalu/Belaid-31M", trust_remote_code=True)

model.restore(["ur zmireɣ ara ad d-aseɣ assa", "anida i tedduḍ a yelli"], tokenizer)
# ['Ur zmireɣ ara ad d-aseɣ assa.', 'Anida i tedduḍ a yelli?']

restore takes a string or a list and is the interface. Calling the model directly returns punctuation_logits and case_logits, both [batch, subwords, classes] — but the labels are per word while the model sees subwords, so the alignment inside restore is what makes them mean anything. Reimplement it only deliberately.

Normalise the input first. The vocabulary is Mammeri-16k, built over text where ɛ is U+025B and never Greek epsilon; homoglyph-corrupted text fragments into byte pieces and the labels degrade with it.

Label scheme

Two classes were removed on evidence rather than by preference.

! and ; fold into PERIOD. Together they are 0.406% of tokens, and the corpus carries Medlet idlisen-nwen! beside Medlet idlisen-nwen. — the same sentence under both marks, so the distinction is not recoverable from text and a class for it costs macro-F1 without buying accuracy.

ALL_CAPS was a third casing class. It occurs once in the development split and three times in test, and the model carrying it emitted fourteen spurious all-caps words for the three real ones. Restoring an acronym to full capitals is therefore out of scope, deliberately: a class that cannot be scored cannot be claimed.

Architecture

Two token-classification heads over the Masinissa encoder — 12 layers, 384 hidden, 6 attention heads, 1,280 intermediate, log-bucketed relative positions, and a 16,000-piece Unigram vocabulary.

The heads are separate because the tasks are. Casing is lexical — whether a word is a name — and punctuation is syntactic. A single softmax over their product would spend capacity on combinations that never occur and make the two error rates impossible to read apart.

Training

Selection is on development macro-F1 and not on loss, and here that is not a formality: the minimum-loss checkpoint was step 9,864 and scores lower on both heads, so selecting on loss would have published a worse model.

Class weighting was tried and removed. Capped inverse-frequency weights at 20× drove comma recall to 0.919 at precision 0.381 — some 1,200 marks inserted that were not there. The label distribution is close to IWSLT2011's, where published systems fine-tune unweighted, so the weighting was dropped rather than tuned.

Decontamination

58.2% of Common Voice Kabyle transcripts also appear in AƔBALU-Text v1, because most are Tatoeba sentences and Tatoeba is in the corpus. Every clip whose text appears in that corpus was excluded from the evaluation splits — which decontaminates the encoder at the same time, since Masinissa was pretrained on the same file. The rows scored above are unseen by both the heads and the backbone.

A transcript carrying no final mark is dropped rather than labelled NONE. Reading them settles what they are: no punctuation and no capitals, a contributor who typed neither. That is typing habit, and training on it teaches transcriber style rather than Kabyle.

Limitations

It restores marks within an utterance, not sentence boundaries across a paragraph. An out-of-domain record carries 1.75 periods on average and the model predicts 1.04. It learned one period, at the end from Common Voice, where every record is one sentence by construction, and question recall follows the same pattern — 0.408 out of domain against 0.886 on test, because a question inside running prose is mid-record. This is the input shape the model was built for: ASR emits one utterance at a time, and that is where 0.793 applies. Segmenting a paragraph into sentences is a separate problem and this model does not solve it.

Comma placement is the weakest mark, and its ceiling is unknown. Precision is 0.680 on test and 0.537 out of domain. Kabyle has no codified comma convention, and the references come from corpus writers who do not agree with each other, so an unmeasured share of these disagreements are placements a second human would also dispute. The comma figures are a floor of untested tightness, not a measured distance from what is achievable.

Text only. Pauses carry sentence-boundary information and this model never hears them. The acoustic branch is designed and deliberately unbuilt: on measurement, text answers which mark well and where the boundary falls poorly, and the audio is what would close the second gap.

One language. Trained and evaluated on Kabyle. Tashelhit, Tarifit, Central Atlas Tamazight and Tamasheq are related but distinct languages; none was tested and none should be assumed.

No safety evaluation of any kind has been performed.

What was not measured

• No inter-annotator ceiling exists for Kabyle punctuation. Nobody has established what two fluent readers agree on, so no figure here can be read as a fraction of what is attainable.
• Segmentation is unscored, because no long-form Kabyle audio with punctuated transcripts exists anywhere to score it on.
• Latency was not benchmarked against the recogniser it follows.

Files

115 tensors. The twelve relative-position tables are derived from the config and rebuilt on load, so they are absent from the weights on purpose — 25.2 MB that would otherwise be shipped and then reported as unexpected keys.

Reproduction

make punctuation TASK=corpus
make modal-upload TASK=punctuation
make modal-punctuation TASK=train EPOCHS=3 RUN=punctuation
make modal-punctuation TASK=evaluate SPLIT=test RUN=punctuation
make modal-punctuation TASK=evaluate SPLIT=ood RUN=punctuation
make release REPO=belaid

The evaluation scores the model and the rule baseline in the same pass over the same rows, because a baseline computed elsewhere on a different sample is not a comparison.

The name

Belaïd At Ali (1909–1950) is the founder of written Kabyle prose. Asked in the 1940s to set down oral tales, he did more than transcribe them — he composed, trying out the novel and the short story in a language that had carried neither. Les Cahiers de Belaïd, published posthumously in 1964, is the first body of Kabyle prose in Latin characters.

Writing prose where none existed meant deciding where a sentence ends, where a clause breaks and what takes a capital — with no precedent to copy. That set of decisions is exactly this model's label set, and it is why the model carries his name rather than a grammarian's.

He sits beside Fadhma-300M by design: Fadhma Aït Mansour Amrouche wrote down the songs she had inherited, and Belaïd made Kabyle a written prose language. One recovers the words; the other renders them as writing.

Citation

@software{agbalu_belaid_2026,
  title  = {Belaid-31M: punctuation and casing restoration for Kabyle},
  author = {AƔBALU},
  year   = {2026},
  url    = {https://huggingface.co/agbalu/Belaid-31M},
  note   = {Two token-classification heads over Masinissa-31M; macro-F1 0.793 over marks}
}

Licence

Apache-2.0 on the weights and the code, for the patent grant. A permissive grant on weights does not relicense the text they were trained on: over AƔBALU-Text v1's 3,041,989 sentences the composition is unclear 34.9%, permissive 32.0%, share-alike 31.0%, non-commercial 2.0%.

Part of AƔBALU, a Kabyle corpus and model collection. The naming is homage.