Wolof-Adapted Industry-Ready Open-Weight Language Models

Gwénolé Lecorvé; Delphine Charlet; Pierre Adam; Floriane Behanzin; Lionel Delphin-Poulat; Johannes Heinecke; Géraldine Damnati; Pelin Kaytmaz; Nourredine Khaous; Charbel Kindji; Meriam Maadi; Abdoulaye Mbaye; Claire Perroux; Ismaël Rousseau; Papa Séga Wadé; Gilles Xiberras; Olivier Zhang; Malek Zitouni

arXiv · 2610.20824

Wolof-Adapted Industry-Ready Open-Weight Language Models

Gwénolé Lecorvé·Delphine Charlet·Pierre Adam·Floriane Behanzin·Lionel Delphin-Poulat·Johannes Heinecke·Géraldine Damnati·Pelin Kaytmaz·Nourredine Khaous·Charbel Kindji·Meriam Maadi·Abdoulaye Mbaye·Claire Perroux·Ismaël Rousseau·Papa Séga Wadé·Gilles Xiberras·Olivier Zhang·Malek Zitouni

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Abstract

Wolof is spoken by 23M people, mostly in Senegal, but remains weakly supported by open-weight language models, while API models raise cost, governance, and sovereignty constraints for local deployments. In this paper, we present 0.6B-14B open-weight models adapted to Wolof through instruction tuning, preference alignment, and model merging. After presenting the pipeline and data, extensive experiments on 63~public and in-house tasks show good performance on Wolof understanding and generation while remaining effective on other languages and cross-lingual skills, with the 8B and 14B models being particularly competitive with substantially larger commercial systems. The models are currently being evaluated in internal customer-care pilots and are publicly available at https://huggingface.co/collections/Orange/wolof-lm .

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Gwénolé Lecorvé, Delphine Charlet, Pierre Adam, Floriane Behanzin, Lionel Delphin-Poulat, Johannes Heinecke, Géraldine Damnati, Pelin Kaytmaz, Nourredine Khaous, Charbel Kindji, Meriam Maadi, Abdoulaye Mbaye, Claire Perroux, Ismaël Rousseau, Papa Séga Wadé, Gilles Xiberras, Olivier Zhang, Malek Zitouni. 2026-10-14. Wolof-Adapted Industry-Ready Open-Weight Language Models. https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.20824

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