Continual Pre-Training for Cross-Lingual LLM Adaptation: Enhancing Japanese Language Capabilities

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Fujii, Kazuki, Nakamura, Taishi, Loem, Mengsay, Iida, Hiroki, Ohi, Masanari, Hattori, Kakeru, Shota, Hirai, Mizuki, Sakae, Yokota, Rio, Okazaki, Naoaki
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Fujii, Kazuki
Nakamura, Taishi
Loem, Mengsay
Iida, Hiroki
Ohi, Masanari
Hattori, Kakeru
Shota, Hirai
Mizuki, Sakae
Yokota, Rio
Okazaki, Naoaki
author_facet Fujii, Kazuki
Nakamura, Taishi
Loem, Mengsay
Iida, Hiroki
Ohi, Masanari
Hattori, Kakeru
Shota, Hirai
Mizuki, Sakae
Yokota, Rio
Okazaki, Naoaki
contents Cross-lingual continual pre-training of large language models (LLMs) initially trained on English corpus allows us to leverage the vast amount of English language resources and reduce the pre-training cost. In this study, we constructed Swallow, an LLM with enhanced Japanese capability, by extending the vocabulary of Llama 2 to include Japanese characters and conducting continual pre-training on a large Japanese web corpus. Experimental results confirmed that the performance on Japanese tasks drastically improved through continual pre-training, and the performance monotonically increased with the amount of training data up to 100B tokens. Consequently, Swallow achieved superior performance compared to other LLMs that were trained from scratch in English and Japanese. An analysis of the effects of continual pre-training revealed that it was particularly effective for Japanese question answering tasks. Furthermore, to elucidate effective methodologies for cross-lingual continual pre-training from English to Japanese, we investigated the impact of vocabulary expansion and the effectiveness of incorporating parallel corpora. The results showed that the efficiency gained through vocabulary expansion had no negative impact on performance, except for the summarization task, and that the combined use of parallel corpora enhanced translation ability.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2404_17790
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Continual Pre-Training for Cross-Lingual LLM Adaptation: Enhancing Japanese Language Capabilities
Fujii, Kazuki
Nakamura, Taishi
Loem, Mengsay
Iida, Hiroki
Ohi, Masanari
Hattori, Kakeru
Shota, Hirai
Mizuki, Sakae
Yokota, Rio
Okazaki, Naoaki
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Cross-lingual continual pre-training of large language models (LLMs) initially trained on English corpus allows us to leverage the vast amount of English language resources and reduce the pre-training cost. In this study, we constructed Swallow, an LLM with enhanced Japanese capability, by extending the vocabulary of Llama 2 to include Japanese characters and conducting continual pre-training on a large Japanese web corpus. Experimental results confirmed that the performance on Japanese tasks drastically improved through continual pre-training, and the performance monotonically increased with the amount of training data up to 100B tokens. Consequently, Swallow achieved superior performance compared to other LLMs that were trained from scratch in English and Japanese. An analysis of the effects of continual pre-training revealed that it was particularly effective for Japanese question answering tasks. Furthermore, to elucidate effective methodologies for cross-lingual continual pre-training from English to Japanese, we investigated the impact of vocabulary expansion and the effectiveness of incorporating parallel corpora. The results showed that the efficiency gained through vocabulary expansion had no negative impact on performance, except for the summarization task, and that the combined use of parallel corpora enhanced translation ability.
title Continual Pre-Training for Cross-Lingual LLM Adaptation: Enhancing Japanese Language Capabilities
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.17790