Lugha-Llama: Adapting Large Language Models for African Languages
Authors: Happy Buzaaba, Alexander Wettig, David Ifeoluwa Adelani, Christiane Fellbaum
Low-resource african languages remain underrepresented in the large training datasets of large language models (LLMs) and, as a result, LLMs struggle to understand these languages. We are releasing three African-centric Lugha-Llama models based on Llama-3.1-8B, which achieve the best performance among open-source models on IrokoBench, a challenging African languages benchmark and AfriQA, a cross-lingual open-retrieval question answering dataset for African languages (Lugha is the Kiswahili word for "language").
All Lugha-Llama models are available on 🤗 huggingface hub.
Read about the findings in this Lugha-Llama blog post.
For the details and findings check the Lugha-Llama paper