Alex Pejovic


2024

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AfriInstruct: Instruction Tuning of African Languages for Diverse Tasks
Kosei Uemura | Mahe Chen | Alex Pejovic | Chika Maduabuchi | Yifei Sun | En-Shiun Lee
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024

Large language models (LLMs) for African languages perform worse compared to their performance in high-resource languages. To address this issue, we introduce AfriInstruct, which specializes in instruction-tuning of multiple African languages covering various tasks. We trained the LLaMa-2-7B using continual pretraining and instruction fine-tuning, which demonstrates superior performance across multiple tasks. Our mixed task evaluation shows that our model outperforms GPT-3.5-Turbo and other baseline models of similar size. Our contributions fill a critical gap of LLM performance between high-resource and African languages.