@inproceedings{cruz-2025-extracting,
    title = "Extracting General-use Transformers for Low-resource Languages via Knowledge Distillation",
    author = "Cruz, Jan Christian Blaise",
    editor = "Hettiarachchi, Hansi  and
      Ranasinghe, Tharindu  and
      Rayson, Paul  and
      Mitkov, Ruslan  and
      Gaber, Mohamed  and
      Premasiri, Damith  and
      Tan, Fiona Anting  and
      Uyangodage, Lasitha",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the First Workshop on Language Models for Low-Resource Languages",
    month = jan,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/Ingest-2025-COMPUTEL/2025.loreslm-1.17/",
    pages = "219--224",
    abstract = "In this paper, we propose the use of simple knowledge distillation to produce smaller and more efficient single-language transformers from Massively Multilingual Transformers (MMTs) to alleviate tradeoffs associated with the use of such in low-resource settings. Using Tagalog as a case study, we show that these smaller single-language models perform on-par with strong baselines in a variety of benchmark tasks in a much more efficient manner. Furthermore, we investigate additional steps during the distillation process that improves the soft-supervision of the target language, and provide a number of analyses and ablations to show the efficacy of the proposed method."
}