LOLA – An Open-Source Massively Multilingual Large Language Model

Nikit Srivastava, Denis Kuchelev, Tatiana Moteu Ngoli, Kshitij Shetty, Michael Roeder, Hamada Zahera, Diego Moussallem, Axel-Cyrille Ngonga Ngomo


Abstract
This paper presents LOLA, a massively multilingual large language model trained on more than 160 languages using a sparse Mixture-of-Experts Transformer architecture. Our architectural and implementation choices address the challenge of harnessing linguistic diversity while maintaining efficiency and avoiding the common pitfalls of multilinguality. Our analysis of the evaluation results shows competitive performance in natural language generation and understanding tasks. Additionally, we demonstrate how the learned expert-routing mechanism exploits implicit phylogenetic linguistic patterns to potentially alleviate the curse of multilinguality. We provide an in-depth look at the training process, an analysis of the datasets, and a balanced exploration of the model’s strengths and limitations. As an open-source model, LOLA promotes reproducibility and serves as a robust foundation for future research. Our findings enable the development of compute-efficient multilingual models with strong, scalable performance across languages.
Anthology ID:
2025.coling-main.428
Volume:
Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Month:
January
Year:
2025
Address:
Abu Dhabi, UAE
Editors:
Owen Rambow, Leo Wanner, Marianna Apidianaki, Hend Al-Khalifa, Barbara Di Eugenio, Steven Schockaert
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
6420–6446
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.428/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Nikit Srivastava, Denis Kuchelev, Tatiana Moteu Ngoli, Kshitij Shetty, Michael Roeder, Hamada Zahera, Diego Moussallem, and Axel-Cyrille Ngonga Ngomo. 2025. LOLA – An Open-Source Massively Multilingual Large Language Model. In Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 6420–6446, Abu Dhabi, UAE. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
LOLA – An Open-Source Massively Multilingual Large Language Model (Srivastava et al., COLING 2025)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.428.pdf