  We present a new pre-trained language model (PLM) for Rabbinic Hebrew, termed
Berel (BERT Embeddings for Rabbinic-Encoded Language). Whilst other PLMs exist
for processing Hebrew texts (e.g., HeBERT, AlephBert), they are all trained on
modern Hebrew texts, which diverges substantially from Rabbinic Hebrew in terms
of its lexicographical, morphological, syntactic and orthographic norms. We
demonstrate the superiority of Berel on Rabbinic texts via a challenge set of
Hebrew homographs. We release the new model and homograph challenge set for
unrestricted use.
