Small Languages, Big Models: A Study of Continual Training on Languages of Norway

David Samuel; Vladislav Mikhailov; Erik Velldal; Lilja Øvrelid; Lucas Georges Gabriel Charpentier; Andrey Kutuzov; Stephan Oepen

arXiv · 2412.06484

Small Languages, Big Models: A Study of Continual Training on Languages of Norway

David Samuel·Vladislav Mikhailov·Erik Velldal·Lilja Øvrelid·Lucas Georges Gabriel Charpentier·Andrey Kutuzov·Stephan Oepen

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Abstract

Training large language models requires vast amounts of data, posing a challenge for less widely spoken languages like Norwegian and even more so for truly low-resource languages like Northern S\'ami. To address this issue, we present a novel three-stage continual training approach that substantially improves the downstream performance together with the inference efficiency for the target languages. Based on our findings, we train, evaluate, and openly release a new generative language model for Norwegian Bokm\r{a}l, Nynorsk, and Northern S\'ami with 11.4 billion parameters: NorMistral-11B.

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David Samuel, Vladislav Mikhailov, Erik Velldal, Lilja Øvrelid, Lucas Georges Gabriel Charpentier, Andrey Kutuzov, Stephan Oepen. 2024-12-09. Small Languages, Big Models: A Study of Continual Training on Languages of Norway. https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.06484

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