Paramanu: Compact and Competitive Monolingual Language Models for Low-Resource Morphologically Rich Indian Languages

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Niyogi, Mitodru, Gaussier, Eric, Bhattacharya, Arnab
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Niyogi, Mitodru
Gaussier, Eric
Bhattacharya, Arnab
author_facet Niyogi, Mitodru
Gaussier, Eric
Bhattacharya, Arnab
contents Multilingual large language models (LLMs) are expensive to pretrain and often suffer from imbalances across languages and datasets, English-centric bias, tokenizer oversegmentation for morphologically rich low-resource languages, and the curse of multilinguality. We introduce PARAMANU, the first family of Indian-only autoregressive language models trained from scratch on open-source language-specific data for the five most spoken Indian languages: Bengali, Hindi, Marathi, Tamil, and Telugu. All models are designed for affordability and are trained on a single GPU with a budget under $1,000, allowing under-resourced researchers to build competitive language models. To address low-resource challenges, we develop morphology-aligned, low-fertility tokenizers, propose an interpolation-based method for token position indices in RoPE based scaling to train longer sequences efficiently. We also create instruction-tuning datasets in Bangla that are translated to the other four languages. Despite their small size (108M-367M parameters), Paramanu achieves a strong performance-efficiency tradeoff and outperforms most larger multilingual models across all five languages. Our collection is available at https://huggingface.co/collections/mitodru/paramanu.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2401_18034
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Paramanu: Compact and Competitive Monolingual Language Models for Low-Resource Morphologically Rich Indian Languages
Niyogi, Mitodru
Gaussier, Eric
Bhattacharya, Arnab
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Multilingual large language models (LLMs) are expensive to pretrain and often suffer from imbalances across languages and datasets, English-centric bias, tokenizer oversegmentation for morphologically rich low-resource languages, and the curse of multilinguality. We introduce PARAMANU, the first family of Indian-only autoregressive language models trained from scratch on open-source language-specific data for the five most spoken Indian languages: Bengali, Hindi, Marathi, Tamil, and Telugu. All models are designed for affordability and are trained on a single GPU with a budget under $1,000, allowing under-resourced researchers to build competitive language models. To address low-resource challenges, we develop morphology-aligned, low-fertility tokenizers, propose an interpolation-based method for token position indices in RoPE based scaling to train longer sequences efficiently. We also create instruction-tuning datasets in Bangla that are translated to the other four languages. Despite their small size (108M-367M parameters), Paramanu achieves a strong performance-efficiency tradeoff and outperforms most larger multilingual models across all five languages. Our collection is available at https://huggingface.co/collections/mitodru/paramanu.
title Paramanu: Compact and Competitive Monolingual Language Models for Low-Resource Morphologically Rich Indian Languages
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.18034