s-nlp/E5-EverGreen-Multilingual-Small

E5-EG-small

A lightweight multilingual model for temporal classification of questions, fine-tuned from intfloat/multilingual-e5-small.

Model Details

Model Description

E5-EG-small (E5 EverGreen - Small) is an efficient multilingual text classification model that determines whether questions have temporally mutable or immutable answers. This model offers a balanced trade-off between performance and computational efficiency.

• Model type: Text Classification
• Base model: intfloat/multilingual-e5-small
• Language(s): Russian, English, French, German, Hebrew, Arabic, Chinese
• License: MIT

Model Sources

• Repository: GitHub
• Paper: Will It Still Be True Tomorrow? Multilingual Evergreen Question Classification to Improve Trustworthy QA

How to Get Started with the Model

from transformers import AutoTokenizer, AutoModelForSequenceClassification
import torch
import time

# Load model and tokenizer
model_name = "s-nlp/E5-EG-small"
tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained(model_name)
model = AutoModelForSequenceClassification.from_pretrained(model_name)

# For optimal performance, use GPU if available
device = torch.device("cuda" if torch.cuda.is_available() else "cpu")
model = model.to(device)
model.eval()

# Batch classification example
questions = [
    "What is the capital of France?",
    "Who won the latest World Cup?",
    "What is the speed of light?",
    "What is the current Bitcoin price?"
]

# Tokenize all questions
inputs = tokenizer(
    questions, 
    return_tensors="pt", 
    padding=True, 
    truncation=True, 
    max_length=64
).to(device)

# Classify
start_time = time.time()
with torch.no_grad():
    outputs = model(**inputs)
    predictions = torch.nn.functional.softmax(outputs.logits, dim=-1)
    predicted_classes = torch.argmax(predictions, dim=-1)

inference_time = (time.time() - start_time) * 1000  # ms

# Display results
class_names = ["Immutable", "Mutable"]
for i, question in enumerate(questions):
    print(f"Q: {question}")
    print(f"   Classification: {class_names[predicted_classes[i].item()]}")
    print(f"   Confidence: {predictions[i][predicted_classes[i]].item():.2f}")

print(f"\nTotal inference time: {inference_time:.2f}ms")
print(f"Average per question: {inference_time/len(questions):.2f}ms")

Training Details

Training Data

Same multilingual dataset as E5-EG-large:

• ~4,000 questions per language
• Balanced class distribution
• Augmented with synthetic and translated data

Training Procedure

Preprocessing

• Identical to E5-EG-large
• Maximum sequence length: 64 tokens
• Multilingual tokenization

Training Hyperparameters

• Training regime: fp16 mixed precision
• Epochs: 10
• Batch size: 32
• Learning rate: 5e-05
• Warmup steps: 300
• Weight decay: 0.01
• Optimizer: AdamW
• Loss function: Focal Loss (γ=2.0, α=0.25) with class weighting
• Gradient accumulation steps: 1

Hardware

• GPUs: Single NVIDIA V100
• Training time: ~2 hours

Evaluation

Testing Data

Same test sets as E5-EG-large (2100 samples per language).

Metrics

Per-Language F1 Scores

Language	F1 Score	Δ vs Large
English	0.88	-0.04
Chinese	0.87	-0.04
French	0.86	-0.04
German	0.85	-0.04
Russian	0.84	-0.04
Hebrew	0.83	-0.04
Arabic	0.82	-0.04

Class-wise Performance

Class	Precision	Recall	F1
Immutable	0.83	0.86	0.84
Mutable	0.86	0.83	0.84

Efficiency Metrics

Metric	E5-EG-small	E5-EG-large	Improvement
Parameters	118M	560M	4.7x smaller
Model Size (MB)	471	2,240	4.8x smaller
Inference Time (ms)	12	45	3.8x faster
Memory Usage (GB)	0.8	3.2	4x less
Throughput (samples/sec)	83	22	3.8x higher

Citation

BibTeX:

@misc{pletenev2025truetomorrowmultilingualevergreen,
      title={Will It Still Be True Tomorrow? Multilingual Evergreen Question Classification to Improve Trustworthy QA}, 
      author={Sergey Pletenev and Maria Marina and Nikolay Ivanov and Daria Galimzianova and Nikita Krayko and Mikhail Salnikov and Vasily Konovalov and Alexander Panchenko and Viktor Moskvoretskii},
      year={2025},
      eprint={2505.21115},
      archivePrefix={arXiv},
      primaryClass={cs.CL},
      url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.21115}, 
}