We argue that current techniques restrict the power of the pre-trained representations, especially for the fine-tuning approaches. The major limitation is that standard language models are unidirectional, and this limits the choice of architectures that can be used during pre-training. For example, in OpenAI GPT, the authors use a left-toright architecture, where every token can only attend to previous tokens in the self-attention layers of the Transformer (Vaswani et al., 2017). Such restrictions are sub-optimal for sentence-level tasks, and could be very harmful when applying finetuning based approaches to token-level tasks such as question answering, where it is crucial to incorporate context from both directions.In this paper, we improve the fine-tuning based approaches by proposing BERT: Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers. BERT alleviates the previously mentioned unidirectionality constraint by using a “masked language model” (MLM) pre-training objective, inspired by the Cloze task (Taylor, 1953). The masked language model randomly masks some of the tokens from the input, and the objective is to predict the original vocabulary id of the masked arXiv:1810.04805v2 [cs.CL] 24 May 2019 word based only on its context. Unlike left-toright language model pre-training, the MLM objective enables the representation to fuse the left and the right context, which allows us to pretrain a deep bidirectional Transformer. In addition to the masked language model, we also use a “next sentence prediction” task that jointly pretrains text-pair representations. The contributions of our paper are as follows: