Paper · arXiv 2409.17912
Atlas-Chat: Adapting Large Language Models for Low-Resource Moroccan Arabic Dialect
Guokan Shang, Hadi Abdine, Yousef Khoubrane, Amr Mohamed, Yassine Abbahaddou, Sofiane Ennadir, Imane Momayiz, Xuguang Ren, Eric Moulines, Preslav Nakov, Michalis Vazirgiannis, Eric Xing
Atlas-Chat, a collection of large language models fine-tuned for Moroccan Arabic (Darija), outperforms state-of-the-art LLMs on Darija-specific tasks.
Abstract
We introduce Atlas-Chat, the first-ever collection of large language models specifically developed for dialectal Arabic. Focusing on Moroccan Arabic, also known as Darija, we construct our instruction dataset by consolidating existing Darija language resources, creating novel datasets both manually and synthetically, and translating English instructions with stringent quality control. Atlas-Chat-9B and 2B models, fine-tuned on the dataset, exhibit superior ability in following Darija instructions and performing standard NLP tasks. Notably, our models outperform both state-of-the-art and Arabic-specialized LLMs like LLaMa, Jais, and AceGPT, e.g., achieving a 13% performance boost over a larger 13B model on DarijaMMLU, in our newly introduced evaluation suite for Darija covering both discriminative and generative tasks. Furthermore, we perform an experimental analysis of various fine-tuning strategies and base model choices to determine optimal configurations. All our resources are publicly accessible, and we believe our work offers comprehensive design methodologies of instruction-tuning for low-resource language variants, which are often neglected in favor of data-rich languages by contemporary LLMs.