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

Emre Can Acikgoz, Mete Erdogan, Deniz Yuret


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.
Anthology ID:
2024.mrl-1.21
Volume:
Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Multilingual Representation Learning (MRL 2024)
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Jonne Sälevä, Abraham Owodunni
Venue:
MRL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
242–268
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.mrl-1.21
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Emre Can Acikgoz, Mete Erdogan, and Deniz Yuret. 2024. Bridging the Bosphorus: Advancing Turkish Large Language Models through Strategies for Low-Resource Language Adaptation and Benchmarking. In Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Multilingual Representation Learning (MRL 2024), pages 242–268, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Bridging the Bosphorus: Advancing Turkish Large Language Models through Strategies for Low-Resource Language Adaptation and Benchmarking (Acikgoz et al., MRL 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.mrl-1.21.pdf