Multilinguality

IKER-GAITU: research on language technology for Basque and other low-resource languages
IKER-GAITU: research on language technology for Basque and other low-resource languages

The general objective of the IKER-GAITU project is to research on language technology to increase the presence of Basque in the digital environment. It will be carried out between 2023 and 2025 thanks to a grant from the Department of Culture and Language Policy of the Basque Government. Current techniques require enormous amounts of textual and oral data per language. On the other hand, the data available for Basque and other low-resource languages might not be enough to attain the same quality as larger languages with the current technology. For this reason, it is essential to research on language technology, so that low-resource languages are present with the same quality as the rest of the languages in these technologies. IKER-GAITU pursues the following research objectives: 1. A system that automatically captures the level of Basque proficiency, written and oral; 2. Bring personalized voice technology to people with disabilities; 3. Spontaneous voice transcription, both when Basque and Spanish are mixed and when there are several speakers; 4. Textual conversational systems in Basque that match the quality of the most powerful large language models. In this project summary we present the results for the first year. More information at https://hitz.eus/iker-gaitu.

Latxa: An Open Language Model and Evaluation Suite for Basque
Latxa: An Open Language Model and Evaluation Suite for Basque

We introduce Latxa, a family of large language models for Basque ranging from 7 to 70 billion parameters. Latxa is based on Llama 2, which we continue pretraining on a new Basque corpus comprising 4.3M documents and 4.2B tokens. Addressing the scarcity of high-quality benchmarks for Basque, we further introduce 4 multiple choice evaluation datasets: EusProficiency, comprising 5,169 questions from official language proficiency exams; EusReading, comprising 352 reading comprehension questions; EusTrivia, comprising 1,715 trivia questions from 5 knowledge areas; and EusExams, comprising 16,774 questions from public examinations. In our extensive evaluation, Latxa outperforms all previous open models we compare to by a large margin. In addition, it is competitive with GPT-4 Turbo in language proficiency and understanding, despite lagging behind in reading comprehension and knowledge-intensive tasks. Both the Latxa family of models, as well as our new pretraining corpora and evaluation datasets, are publicly available under open licenses at https://github.com/hitz-zentroa/latxa. Our suite enables reproducible research on methods to build LLMs for low-resource languages.