Bridging the Bosphorus: Advancing Turkish Large Language Models through Strategies for Low-Resource Language Adaptation and Benchmarking

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2405.04685v1
• Date: Tue, 7 May 2024 21:58:45 GMT
• Title: Bridging the Bosphorus: Advancing Turkish Large Language Models through Strategies for Low-Resource Language Adaptation and Benchmarking
• Authors: Emre Can Acikgoz, Mete Erdogan, Deniz Yuret,
• Abstract summary: Large Language Models (LLMs) are becoming crucial across various fields, emphasizing the urgency for high-quality models in underrepresented languages. This study explores the unique challenges faced by low-resource languages, such as data scarcity, model selection, evaluation, and computational limitations.
• Score: 1.3716808114696444
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/
• Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are becoming crucial across various fields, emphasizing the urgency for high-quality models in underrepresented languages. This study explores the unique challenges faced by low-resource languages, such as data scarcity, model selection, evaluation, and computational limitations, with a special focus on Turkish. We conduct an in-depth analysis to evaluate the impact of training strategies, model choices, and data availability on the performance of LLMs designed for underrepresented languages. Our approach includes two methodologies: (i) adapting existing LLMs originally pretrained in English to understand Turkish, and (ii) developing a model from the ground up using Turkish pretraining data, both supplemented with supervised fine-tuning on a novel Turkish instruction-tuning dataset aimed at enhancing reasoning capabilities. The relative performance of these methods is evaluated through the creation of a new leaderboard for Turkish LLMs, featuring benchmarks that assess different reasoning and knowledge skills. Furthermore, we conducted experiments on data and model scaling, both during pretraining and fine-tuning, simultaneously emphasizing the capacity for knowledge transfer across languages and addressing the challenges of catastrophic forgetting encountered during fine-tuning on a different language. Our goal is to offer a detailed guide for advancing the LLM framework in low-resource linguistic contexts, thereby making natural language processing (NLP) benefits more globally accessible.

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