Building a Strong Instruction Language Model for a Less-Resourced Language
This addresses the issue of language bias in AI for speakers of less-resourced languages like Slovene, though it is incremental as it adapts existing methods.
The authors tackled the problem of poor performance of large language models on less-resourced languages by adapting an LLM to Slovene, resulting in GaMS3-12B, which outperforms a 12B Gemma 3 model and achieves over 60% win rate against GPT-4o in Slovene evaluations.
Large language models (LLMs) have become an essential tool for natural language processing and artificial intelligence in general. Current open-source models are primarily trained on English texts, resulting in poorer performance on less-resourced languages and cultures. We present a set of methodological approaches necessary for the successful adaptation of an LLM to a less-resourced language, and demonstrate them using the Slovene language. We present GaMS3-12B, a generative model for Slovene with 12 billion parameters, and demonstrate that it is the best-performing open-source model for Slovene within its parameter range. We adapted the model to the Slovene language using three-stage continual pre-training of the Gemma 3 model, followed by two-stage supervised fine-tuning (SFT). We trained the model on a combination of 140B Slovene, English, Bosnian, Serbian, and Croatian pretraining tokens, and over 200 thousand English and Slovene SFT examples. We evaluate GaMS3-12B on the Slovenian-LLM-Eval datasets, English-to-Slovene translation, and the Slovene LLM arena. We show that the described model outperforms 12B Gemma 3 across all three scenarios and performs comparably to much larger commercial GPT-4o in the Slovene LLM arena, achieving a win rate of over 60 %.