LLMs for Extremely Low-Resource Finno-Ugric Languages
Taido Purason, Hele-Andra Kuulmets, Mark Fishel
Abstract
The advancement of large language models (LLMs) has predominantly focused on high-resource languages, leaving low-resource languages, such as those in the Finno-Ugric family, significantly underrepresented. This paper addresses this gap by focusing on Võro, Livonian, and Komi. We cover almost the entire cycle of LLM creation, from data collection to instruction tuning and evaluation. Our contributions include developing multilingual base and instruction-tuned models; creating evaluation benchmarks, including the smugri-MT-bench multi-turn conversational benchmark; and conducting human evaluation. We intend for this work to promote linguistic diversity, ensuring that lesser-resourced languages can benefit from advancements in NLP.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{purason-etal-2025-llms,
title = "{LLM}s for Extremely Low-Resource {F}inno-{U}gric Languages",
author = "Purason, Taido and
Kuulmets, Hele-Andra and
Fishel, Mark",
editor = "Chiruzzo, Luis and
Ritter, Alan and
Wang, Lu",
booktitle = "Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2025",
month = apr,
year = "2025",
address = "Albuquerque, New Mexico",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2025.findings-naacl.373/",
pages = "6677--6697",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-195-7"
}