readme: add initial version

README.md

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+---
+license: mit
+language:
+- en
+- de
+---
+
+# hmByT5 - Preliminary Language Models
+
+Preliminary Historic Multilingual and Monolingual ByT5 Models. Following languages are currently covered:
+
+* English (British Library Corpus - Books)
+* German (Europeana Newspaper)
+
+More details can be found in [our GitHub repository](https://github.com/stefan-it/hmByT5).
+
+# Pretraining
+
+We use the official JAX/FLAX example in Hugging Face Transformers to pretrain a ByT5 model on a single v3-8 TPU.
+Details about the training can be found [here](https://github.com/stefan-it/hmByT5/tree/main/hmbyt5-flax).
+
+# Evaluation on Downstream Tasks (NER)
+
+We evaluated the hmByT5 model on downstream tasks:
+
+| Model                                                                                                                                                                           | English AjMC | German AjMC  | French AjMC  | Finnish NewsEye | Swedish NewsEye | Dutch ICDAR  | French ICDAR | Avg. |
+|---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------|--------------|--------------|--------------|-----------------|-----------------|--------------|--------------|------|
+| [`hmbyt5-preliminary/byt5-small-english-german`](https://huggingface.co/hmbyt5-preliminary/byt5-small-english-german)                                                           | 85.74 ± 0.72 | 87.45 ± 0.67 | 84.23 ± 0.65 |                 |                 |              |              |      |
+
+# Acknowledgements
+
+Research supported with Cloud TPUs from Google's [TPU Research Cloud](https://sites.research.google/trc/about/) (TRC).
+Many Thanks for providing access to the TPUs ❤️