diff --git a/annif/backend/xtransformer.py b/annif/backend/xtransformer.py
index 1d92a7f25..983403fd6 100644
--- a/annif/backend/xtransformer.py
+++ b/annif/backend/xtransformer.py
@@ -80,8 +80,7 @@ class XTransformerBackend(mixins.TfidfVectorizerMixin, backend.AnnifBackend):
         'imbalanced_depth': 100,
         'max_match_clusters': 32768,
         'do_fine_tune': True,
-        # 'model_shortcut': 'distilbert-base-multilingual-cased',
-        'model_shortcut': 'bert-base-multilingual-uncased',
+        'model_shortcut': 'distilbert-base-multilingual-cased',
         'beam_size': 20,
         'limit': 100,
         'post_processor': 'sigmoid',
@@ -135,22 +134,18 @@ def _create_train_files(self, veccorpus, corpus):
         txt_pth = osp.join(self.datadir, self.train_txt_file)
         with open(txt_pth, 'w',  encoding='utf-8') as txt_file:
             for doc, vector in zip(corpus.documents, veccorpus):
-                subject_ids = [
-                    self.project.subjects.by_uri(uri)
-                    for uri
-                    in doc.uris]
-                subject_ids = [s_id for s_id in subject_ids if s_id]
-                if not (subject_ids and doc.text):
+                subject_set = doc.subject_set
+                if not (subject_set and doc.text):
                     continue # noqa
                 print(' '.join(doc.text.split()), file=txt_file)
                 Xs.append(
                     sp.csr_matrix(vector, dtype=np.float32).sorted_indices())
                 ys.append(
                     sp.csr_matrix((
-                        np.ones(len(subject_ids)),
+                        np.ones(len(subject_set)),
                         (
-                            np.zeros(len(subject_ids)),
-                            subject_ids)),
+                            np.zeros(len(subject_set)),
+                            [s for s in subject_set])),
                         shape=(1, len(self.project.subjects)),
                         dtype=np.float32
                         ).sorted_indices())
@@ -239,11 +234,8 @@ def _suggest(self, text, params):
             post_processor=new_params['post_processor'])
         results = []
         for idx, score in zip(prediction.indices, prediction.data):
-            subject = self.project.subjects[idx]
             results.append(SubjectSuggestion(
-                uri=subject[0],
-                label=subject[1],
-                notation=subject[2],
+                subject_id=idx,
                 score=score
             ))
         return ListSuggestionResult(results)