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Main Authors: Nag, Arijit, Chakrabarti, Soumen, Mukherjee, Animesh, Ganguly, Niloy
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.10244
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author Nag, Arijit
Chakrabarti, Soumen
Mukherjee, Animesh
Ganguly, Niloy
author_facet Nag, Arijit
Chakrabarti, Soumen
Mukherjee, Animesh
Ganguly, Niloy
contents Open-source Large Language models (OsLLMs) propel the democratization of natural language research by giving the flexibility to augment or update model parameters for performance improvement. Nevertheless, like proprietary LLMs, Os-LLMs offer poorer performance on low-resource languages (LRLs) than high-resource languages (HRLs), owing to smaller amounts of training data and underrepresented vocabulary. On the other hand, continual pre-training (CPT) with large amounts of language-specific data is a costly proposition in terms of data acquisition and computational resources. Our goal is to drastically reduce CPT cost. To that end, we first develop a new algorithm to select a subset of texts from a larger corpus. We show the effectiveness of our technique using very little CPT data. In search of further improvement, we design a new algorithm to select tokens to include in the LLM vocabulary. We experiment with the recent Llama-3 model and nine Indian languages with diverse scripts and extent of resource availability. For evaluation, we use IndicGenBench, a generation task benchmark dataset for Indic languages. We experiment with various CPT corpora and augmented vocabulary size and offer insights across language families.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2412_10244
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Efficient Continual Pre-training of LLMs for Low-resource Languages
Nag, Arijit
Chakrabarti, Soumen
Mukherjee, Animesh
Ganguly, Niloy
Computation and Language
Machine Learning
Open-source Large Language models (OsLLMs) propel the democratization of natural language research by giving the flexibility to augment or update model parameters for performance improvement. Nevertheless, like proprietary LLMs, Os-LLMs offer poorer performance on low-resource languages (LRLs) than high-resource languages (HRLs), owing to smaller amounts of training data and underrepresented vocabulary. On the other hand, continual pre-training (CPT) with large amounts of language-specific data is a costly proposition in terms of data acquisition and computational resources. Our goal is to drastically reduce CPT cost. To that end, we first develop a new algorithm to select a subset of texts from a larger corpus. We show the effectiveness of our technique using very little CPT data. In search of further improvement, we design a new algorithm to select tokens to include in the LLM vocabulary. We experiment with the recent Llama-3 model and nine Indian languages with diverse scripts and extent of resource availability. For evaluation, we use IndicGenBench, a generation task benchmark dataset for Indic languages. We experiment with various CPT corpora and augmented vocabulary size and offer insights across language families.
title Efficient Continual Pre-training of LLMs for Low-resource Languages
topic Computation and Language
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.10244