  Scarcity of resources such as annotated text corpora for under-resourced
languages like Albanian is a serious impediment in computational linguistics
and natural language processing research. This paper presents AlbNER, a corpus
of 900 sentences with labeled named entities, collected from Albanian Wikipedia
articles. Preliminary results with BERT and RoBERTa variants fine-tuned and
tested with AlbNER data indicate that model size has slight impact on NER
performance, whereas language transfer has a significant one. AlbNER corpus and
these obtained results should serve as baselines for future experiments.
