Vlad-Andrei Negoiță
2026
Improving Romanian LLM Pretraining Data using Diversity and Quality Filtering
Vlad-Andrei Negoiță | Mihai Masala | Traian Rebedea
Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Language Models for Low-Resource Languages (LoResLM 2026)
Vlad-Andrei Negoiță | Mihai Masala | Traian Rebedea
Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Language Models for Low-Resource Languages (LoResLM 2026)
Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently exploded in popularity, often matching or outperforming human abilities on many tasks. One of the key factors in training LLMs is the availability and curation of high-quality data.Data quality is especially crucial for under-represented languages, where high-quality corpora are scarce. In this work we study the characteristics and coverage of Romanian pretraining corpora and we examine how they differ from English data. By training a lightweight multitask model on carefully LLM-annotated Romanian texts, we are able to analyze and perform multi-level filtering (e.g., educational value, topic, format) to generate high-quality pretraining datasets. Our experiments show noteworthy trends in the topics present in Romanian and English data, while also proving the effectiveness of filtering data through improved LLM pretraining performance across multiple benchmarks.