Seed-Free Synthetic Data Generation Framework for Instruction-Tuning LLMs: A Case Study in Thai

Parinthapat Pengpun, Can Udomcharoenchaikit, Weerayut Buaphet, Peerat Limkonchotiwat


Abstract
We present a synthetic data approach for instruction-tuning large language models (LLMs) for low-resource languages in a data-efficient manner, specifically focusing on Thai. We identify three key properties that contribute to the effectiveness of instruction-tuning datasets: fluency, diversity, and cultural context. We propose a seed-data-free framework for generating synthetic instruction-tuning data that incorporates these essential properties. Our framework employs an LLM to generate diverse topics, retrieve relevant contexts from Wikipedia, and create instructions for various tasks, such as question answering, summarization, and conversation. The experimental results show that our best-performing synthetic dataset, which incorporates all three key properties, achieves competitive performance using only 5,000 instructions when compared to state-of-the-art Thai LLMs trained on hundreds of thousands of instructions. Our code and dataset are publicly available at https://github.com/parinzee/seed-free-synthetic-instruct.
Anthology ID:
2024.acl-srw.38
Volume:
Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 4: Student Research Workshop)
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand
Editors:
Xiyan Fu, Eve Fleisig
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
438–457
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-srw.38
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Parinthapat Pengpun, Can Udomcharoenchaikit, Weerayut Buaphet, and Peerat Limkonchotiwat. 2024. Seed-Free Synthetic Data Generation Framework for Instruction-Tuning LLMs: A Case Study in Thai. In Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 4: Student Research Workshop), pages 438–457, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Seed-Free Synthetic Data Generation Framework for Instruction-Tuning LLMs: A Case Study in Thai (Pengpun et al., ACL 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-srw.38.pdf