UnifiedCrawl: Aggregated Common Crawl for Affordable Adaptation of LLMs on Low-Resource Languages

Bethel Melesse Tessema, Akhil Kedia, Tae-Sun Chung

UnifiedCrawl: Aggregated Common Crawl for Affordable Adaptation of LLMs on Low-Resource Languages: 7 upvotes on Hugging Face Daily Papers, #14 of 15 papers on 2024-11-22. Day-by-day upvote history.

Large language models (LLMs) under-perform on low-resource languages due to limited training data. We present a method to efficiently collect text data for low-resource languages from the entire Common Crawl corpus. Our approach, UnifiedCrawl, filters and extracts common crawl using minimal compute resources, yielding mono-lingual datasets much larger than previously available sources. We demonstrate that leveraging this data to fine-tuning multilingual LLMs via efficient adapter methods (QLoRA) significantly boosts performance on the low-resource language, while minimizing VRAM usage. Our experiments show large improvements in language modeling perplexity and an increase in few-shot prompting scores. Our work and released source code provide an affordable approach to improve LLMs for low-resource languages using consumer hardware. Our source code is available here at https://github.com/bethelmelesse/unifiedcrawl.

Paper page on Hugging Face · arXiv

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