Massively Multilingual Adaptation of Large Language Models Using
  Bilingual Translation Data
This paper investigates a critical design decision in the practice of
massively multilingual continual pre-training -- the inclusion of parallel
data. Specifically, we study the impact of bilingual translation data for
massively multilingual language adaptation of the Llama3 family of models to
500 languages. To this end, we construct the MaLA bilingual translation corpus,
containing data from more than 2,500 language pairs. Subsequently, we develop
the EMMA-500 Llama 3 suite of four massively multilingual models -- continually
pre-trained from the Llama 3 family of base models extensively on diverse data
mixes up to 671B tokens -- and explore the effect of continual pre-training
with or without bilingual translation data. Comprehensive evaluation across 7
tasks and 12 benchmarks demonstrates that bilingual data tends to enhance
language transfer and performance, particularly for low-resource languages. We
open-source the MaLA corpus, EMMA-500 Llama 3 suite artefacts, code, and model
generations.
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Shaoxiong Ji
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2025-06-03T08:37:04.382Z
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Zihao Li
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Zihao Li
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Jaakko Paavola
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Jaakko Paavola
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Indraneil Paul
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Indraneil Paul
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Hengyu Luo
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2025-06-03T12:42:49.625Z
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Hengyu Luo
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Jörg Tiedemann
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2025-06-03T12:42:25.922Z
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Jörg Tiedemann
user
tiedeman
Massively Multilingual Adaptation of Large Language Models Using
  Bilingual Translation Data
This paper investigates a critical design decision in the practice of
massively multilingual continual pre-training -- the inclusion of parallel
data. Specifically, we study the impact of bilingual translation data for
massively multilingual language adaptation of the Llama3 family of models to
500 languages. To this end, we construct the MaLA bilingual translation corpus,
containing data from more than 2,500 language pairs. Subsequently, we develop
the EMMA-500 Llama 3 suite of four massively multilingual models -- continually
pre-trained from the Llama 3 family of base models extensively on diverse data
mixes up to 671B tokens -- and explore the effect of continual pre-training
with or without bilingual translation data. Comprehensive evaluation across 7
tasks and 12 benchmarks demonstrates that bilingual data tends to enhance
language transfer and performance, particularly for low-resource languages. We
open-source the MaLA corpus, EMMA-500 Llama 3 suite artefacts, code, and model
generations.
Bilingual translation data enhances language transfer and performance in massively multilingual language adaptation of the Llama3 family of models.
massively multilingual continual pre-training bilingual translation data Llama3 MaLA bilingual translation corpus EMMA-500 Llama 3 suite continual pre-training language transfer low-resource languages