tag, branch and/or release code for reproducibility

[jowagner]

While people who want to replicate our paper can check out code based on a commit number found by inspecting the commit history, they are at risk to pick

• a too early commit: they would miss late additions (code used in the experiment but forgotten to add to the repo at the time of use)
• a too late commit: they would use code with features or bug fixes that were not used in the paper

We should tag, branch and/or release code to make it easy for visitors to pick the right code for reproducibility.

A branch would make it possible to keep updating the README (and to make late additions of code used in the experiments) even after the main branch diverges, e.g. when the main branch changes the steps and/or tools to carry out the experiment. This branch could be named "bert-base-irish-cased-v1", matching the model name in the huggingface model repository.

We also need to document commit number / version of wiki-bert-pipeline and opusfilter. (The idea of using a fork in your own github account only works as long as you remember to never hit the "fetch upstream" button or to make any other changes to your fork.)

[jbrry]

Thanks - it might be safe to do a release before any new code is added, and we can also make a branch as well just in case we want to update anything that works with the old functionality. Is there any specific commit we should release/branch from? Looking at the recent commits, most commits since 2022 seem to be fairly cosmetic and shouldn't change things too much. In that case, should we make our release/branch from the most recent commit?

Good advice about keeping track of the relevant commits used for the external libraries, opusfilter and wikibert-pipeline. I will do that too.

[jowagner]

I see no functional changes this year in 9b45a4d...master

Branching from head should be ok and is easiest. If you prefer to branch from an earlier commit you probably will want to cherry pick all commits updating the readme.

[jbrry]

Thanks, I agree.

I made releases from the relevant branches of our forks of:

• wiki-bert-pipeline https://github.com/jbrry/wiki-bert-pipeline/releases/tag/v0.1.0

• OpusFilter: https://github.com/jbrry/OpusFilter/releases/tag/1.1.0.

I updated the README 5be6457 with instructions to download these releases specifically, so users will have a snapshot of these external libraries that won't be affected by upstream merges.

These releases/dependencies form the basis of the v0.1.0 release of Irish-BERT: https://github.com/jbrry/Irish-BERT/releases/tag/v0.1.0.