BabyLMs for isiXhosa: Data-Efficient Language Modelling in a Low-Resource Context

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2501.03855v1
• Date: Tue, 07 Jan 2025 15:13:45 GMT
• Title: BabyLMs for isiXhosa: Data-Efficient Language Modelling in a Low-Resource Context
• Authors: Alexis Matzopoulos, Charl Hendriks, Hishaam Mahomed, Francois Meyer,
• Abstract summary: BabyLM challenge called on participants to develop sample-efficient language models. submissions were pretrained on a fixed English corpus, limited to the amount of words children are exposed to in development. New architectures for data-efficient language modelling outperformed models trained on trillions of words.
• Score: 2.57490464660469
• License:
• Abstract: The BabyLM challenge called on participants to develop sample-efficient language models. Submissions were pretrained on a fixed English corpus, limited to the amount of words children are exposed to in development (<100m). The challenge produced new architectures for data-efficient language modelling, which outperformed models trained on trillions of words. This is promising for low-resource languages, where available corpora are limited to much less than 100m words. In this paper, we explore the potential of BabyLMs for low-resource languages, using the isiXhosa language as a case study. We pretrain two BabyLM architectures, ELC-BERT and MLSM, on an isiXhosa corpus. They outperform a vanilla pretrained model on POS tagging and NER, achieving notable gains (+3.2 F1) for the latter. In some instances, the BabyLMs even outperform XLM-R. Our findings show that data-efficient models are viable for low-resource languages, but highlight the continued importance, and lack of, high-quality pretraining data. Finally, we visually analyse how BabyLM architectures encode isiXhosa.

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