Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have dominated much of the artificial intelligence scene with their ability to process and generate natural languages. However, the majority of LLM research and development remains English-centric, leaving low-resource languages such as those in the Southeast Asian (SEA) region under-represented. To address this representation gap, we introduce Llama-SEA-LION-v3-8B-IT and Gemma-SEA-LION-v3-9B-IT, two cutting-edge multilingual LLMs designed for SEA languages. The SEA-LION family of LLMs supports 11 SEA languages, namely English, Chinese, Indonesian, Vietnamese, Malay, Thai, Burmese, Lao, Filipino, Tamil, and Khmer. Our work leverages large-scale multilingual continued pre-training with a comprehensive post-training regime involving multiple stages of instruction fine-tuning, alignment, and model merging. Evaluation results on multilingual benchmarks indicate that our models achieve state-of-the-art performance across LLMs supporting SEA languages. We open-source the models to benefit the wider SEA community.

With the rapid emergence of novel capabilities in Large Language Models (LLMs), the need for rigorous multilingual and multiculturalbenchmarks that are integrated has become more pronounced. Though existing LLM benchmarks are capable of evaluating specificcapabilities of LLMs in English as well as in various mid- to low-resource languages, including those in the Southeast Asian (SEA)region, a comprehensive and culturally representative evaluation suite for the SEA languages has not been developed thus far.Here, we present SEA-HELM, a holistic linguistic and cultural LLM evaluation suite that emphasises SEA languages, comprisingfive core pillars: (1) NLP CLASSICS, (2) LLM-SPECIFICS, (3) SEA LINGUISTICS, (4) SEA CULTURE, (5) SAFETY. SEA-HELMcurrently supports Filipino, Indonesian, Tamil, Thai, and Vietnamese. We also introduce the SEA-HELM leaderboard, which allows users to understand models’ multilingual and multicultural performance in a systematic and user-friendly manner. We make the SEA-HELM evaluation code publicly available.

Tamil is a relatively low-resource language in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP). Recent years have seen a growth in Tamil NLP datasets in Natural Language Understanding (NLU) or Natural Language Generation (NLG) tasks, but high-quality linguistic resources remain scarce. In order to alleviate this gap in resources, this paper introduces Aalamaram, a treebank with rich linguistic annotations for the Tamil language. It is hitherto the largest publicly available Tamil treebank with almost 10,000 sentences from diverse sources and is annotated for the tasks of Part-of-speech (POS) tagging, Named Entity Recognition (NER), Morphological Parsing and Dependency Parsing. Close attention has also been paid to multi-word segmentation, especially in the context of Tamil clitics. Although the treebank is based largely on the Universal Dependencies (UD) specifications, significant effort has been made to adjust the annotation rules according to the idiosyncrasies and complexities of the Tamil language, thereby providing a valuable resource for linguistic research and NLP developments.