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Main Authors: Corral, Ander, Sarasua, Ixak, Saralegi, Xabier
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.13922
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author Corral, Ander
Sarasua, Ixak
Saralegi, Xabier
author_facet Corral, Ander
Sarasua, Ixak
Saralegi, Xabier
contents Large language models (LLMs) are typically optimized for resource-rich languages like English, exacerbating the gap between high-resource and underrepresented languages. This work presents a detailed analysis of strategies for developing a model capable of following instructions in a low-resource language, specifically Basque, by focusing on three key stages: pre-training, instruction tuning, and alignment with human preferences. Our findings demonstrate that continual pre-training with a high-quality Basque corpus of around 600 million words improves natural language understanding (NLU) of the foundational model by over 12 points. Moreover, instruction tuning and human preference alignment using automatically translated datasets proved highly effective, resulting in a 24-point improvement in instruction-following performance. The resulting models, Llama-eus-8B and Llama-eus-8B-instruct, establish a new state-of-the-art for Basque in the sub-10B parameter category.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2412_13922
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Pipeline Analysis for Developing Instruct LLMs in Low-Resource Languages: A Case Study on Basque
Corral, Ander
Sarasua, Ixak
Saralegi, Xabier
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Large language models (LLMs) are typically optimized for resource-rich languages like English, exacerbating the gap between high-resource and underrepresented languages. This work presents a detailed analysis of strategies for developing a model capable of following instructions in a low-resource language, specifically Basque, by focusing on three key stages: pre-training, instruction tuning, and alignment with human preferences. Our findings demonstrate that continual pre-training with a high-quality Basque corpus of around 600 million words improves natural language understanding (NLU) of the foundational model by over 12 points. Moreover, instruction tuning and human preference alignment using automatically translated datasets proved highly effective, resulting in a 24-point improvement in instruction-following performance. The resulting models, Llama-eus-8B and Llama-eus-8B-instruct, establish a new state-of-the-art for Basque in the sub-10B parameter category.
title Pipeline Analysis for Developing Instruct LLMs in Low-Resource Languages: A Case Study on Basque
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.13922