Small Languages, Big Models: A Study of Continual Training on Languages of Norway
Date
2025-03
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
University of Tartu Library
Abstract
Training large language models requires vast amounts of data, posing a challenge for less widely spoken languages like Norwegian and even more so for truly low-resource languages like Northern Sámi. To address this issue, we present a novel three-stage continual training approach that substantially improves the downstream performance together with the inference efficiency for the target languages. Based on our findings, we train, evaluate, and openly release a new generative language model for Norwegian Bokmål, Nynorsk, and Northern Sámi with 11.4 billion parameters: NorMistral-11B.