EthioLLM: Multilingual Large Language Models for Ethiopian Languages with Task Evaluation
Atnafu Lambebo Tonja, Israel Abebe Azime, Tadesse Destaw Belay, Mesay Gemeda Yigezu, Moges Ahmed Ah Mehamed, Abinew Ali Ayele, Ebrahim Chekol Jibril, Michael Melese Woldeyohannis, Olga Kolesnikova, Philipp Slusallek, Dietrich Klakow, Seid Muhie Yimam
Abstract
Large language models (LLMs) have gained popularity recently due to their outstanding performance in various downstream Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. However, low-resource languages are still lagging behind current state-of-the-art (SOTA) developments in the field of NLP due to insufficient resources to train LLMs. Ethiopian languages exhibit remarkable linguistic diversity, encompassing a wide array of scripts, and are imbued with profound religious and cultural significance. This paper introduces EthioLLM – multilingual large language models for five Ethiopian languages (Amharic, Ge’ez, Afan Oromo, Somali, and Tigrinya) and English, and Ethiobenchmark – a new benchmark dataset for various downstream NLP tasks. We evaluate the performance of these models across five downstream NLP tasks. We open-source our multilingual language models, new benchmark datasets for various downstream tasks, and task-specific fine-tuned language models and discuss the performance of the models. Our dataset and models are available at the https://huggingface.co/EthioNLP repository.- Anthology ID:
- 2024.lrec-main.561
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)
- Month:
- May
- Year:
- 2024
- Address:
- Torino, Italia
- Editors:
- Nicoletta Calzolari, Min-Yen Kan, Veronique Hoste, Alessandro Lenci, Sakriani Sakti, Nianwen Xue
- Venues:
- LREC | COLING
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- ELRA and ICCL
- Note:
- Pages:
- 6341–6352
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.561
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Atnafu Lambebo Tonja, Israel Abebe Azime, Tadesse Destaw Belay, Mesay Gemeda Yigezu, Moges Ahmed Ah Mehamed, Abinew Ali Ayele, Ebrahim Chekol Jibril, Michael Melese Woldeyohannis, Olga Kolesnikova, Philipp Slusallek, Dietrich Klakow, and Seid Muhie Yimam. 2024. EthioLLM: Multilingual Large Language Models for Ethiopian Languages with Task Evaluation. In Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), pages 6341–6352, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
- Cite (Informal):
- EthioLLM: Multilingual Large Language Models for Ethiopian Languages with Task Evaluation (Tonja et al., LREC-COLING 2024)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/dois-2013-emnlp/2024.lrec-main.561.pdf