Qomhra: A Bilingual Irish-English Large Language Model

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2510.17652v1
• Date: Mon, 20 Oct 2025 15:27:53 GMT
• Title: Qomhra: A Bilingual Irish-English Large Language Model
• Abstract summary: Qomhr'a is a bilingual Irish-English large language model (LLM) developed under low-resource constraints.<n> Qomhr'a is evaluated across benchmarks testing translation, gender understanding, topic identification and world knowledge with gains of up to 29% in Irish and 44% in English.
• Score: 0.0
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
• Abstract: This paper introduces Qomhr\'a, a bilingual Irish-English large language model (LLM), developed under low-resource constraints presenting a complete pipeline spanning bilingual continued pre-training, instruction tuning, and alignment from human preferences. Newly accessible Irish corpora and English text are mixed and curated to improve Irish performance while preserving English ability. 6 closed-weight LLMs are judged for their Irish text generation by a native speaker, a learner and other LLMs. Google's Gemini-2.5-Pro is ranked the highest and is subsequently used to synthesise instruction tuning and human preference datasets. Two datasets are contributed leveraging Gemini-2.5-Pro: a 30K Irish-English parallel instruction tuning dataset and a 1K human preference dataset, generating accepted and rejected responses that show near perfect alignment with a native Irish speaker. Qomhr\'a is comprehensively evaluated across benchmarks testing translation, gender understanding, topic identification and world knowledge with gains of up to 29% in Irish and 44% in English. Qomhr\'a also undergoes instruction tuning and demonstrates clear progress in instruction following, crucial for chatbot functionality.

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