@inproceedings{ljubesic-etal-2024-language,
    title = "Language Models on a Diet: Cost-Efficient Development of Encoders for Closely-Related Languages via Additional Pretraining",
    author = "Ljube{\v{s}}i{\'c}, Nikola  and
      Suchomel, V{\'\i}t  and
      Rupnik, Peter  and
      Kuzman, Taja  and
      van Noord, Rik",
    editor = "Melero, Maite  and
      Sakti, Sakriani  and
      Soria, Claudia",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 3rd Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Under-resourced Languages @ LREC-COLING 2024",
    month = may,
    year = "2024",
    address = "Torino, Italia",
    publisher = "ELRA and ICCL",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2024.sigul-1.23",
    pages = "189--203",
    abstract = "The world of language models is going through turbulent times, better and ever larger models are coming out at an unprecedented speed. However, we argue that, especially for the scientific community, encoder models of up to 1 billion parameters are still very much needed, their primary usage being in enriching large collections of data with metadata necessary for downstream research. We investigate the best way to ensure the existence of such encoder models on the set of very closely related languages - Croatian, Serbian, Bosnian and Montenegrin, by setting up a diverse benchmark for these languages, and comparing the trained-from-scratch models with the new models constructed via additional pretraining of existing multilingual models. We show that comparable performance to dedicated from-scratch models can be obtained by additionally pretraining available multilingual models even with a limited amount of computation. We also show that neighboring languages, in our case Slovenian, can be included in the additional pretraining with little to no loss in the performance of the final model.",
}

The world of language models is going through turbulent times, better and ever larger models are coming out at an unprecedented speed. However, we argue that, especially for the scientific community, encoder models of up to 1 billion parameters are still very much needed, their primary usage being in enriching large collections of data with metadata necessary for downstream research. We investigate the best way to ensure the existence of such encoder models on the set of very closely related languages - Croatian, Serbian, Bosnian and Montenegrin, by setting up a diverse benchmark for these languages, and comparing the trained-from-scratch models with the new models constructed via additional pretraining of existing multilingual models. We show that comparable performance to dedicated from-scratch models can be obtained by additionally pretraining available multilingual models even with a limited amount of computation. We also show that neighboring languages, in our case Slovenian, can be included in the additional pretraining with little to no loss in the performance of the final model.
Ljube{\v{s}}i{\'c}, Nikola Suchomel, V{\'\i}t Rupnik, Peter Kuzman, Taja van Noord, Rik
Language Models on a Diet: Cost-Efficient Development of Encoders for Closely-Related Languages via Additional Pretraining