Goldfish is a suite of monolingual language models trained for 350 languages. This model is the Swahili (Latin script) model trained on 5MB of data, after accounting for an estimated byte premium of 1.26; content-matched text in Swahili takes on average 1.26x as many UTF-8 bytes to encode as English. The Goldfish models are trained primarily for comparability across languages and for low-resource languages; Goldfish performance for high-resource languages is not designed to be comparable with modern large language models (LLMs).

Note: swa_latn is a macrolanguage code. None of its contained individual languages are included in Goldfish (for script latn).

All training and hyperparameter details are in our paper, Goldfish: Monolingual Language Models for 350 Languages (Chang et al., 2024).

Training code and sample usage: https://github.com/tylerachang/goldfish

Sample usage also in this Google Colab: link

To access all Goldfish model details programmatically, see https://github.com/tylerachang/goldfish/blob/main/model_details.json. All models are trained with a [CLS] (same as [BOS]) token prepended, and a [SEP] (same as [EOS]) token separating sequences. For best results, make sure that [CLS] is prepended to your input sequence (see sample usage linked above)! Details for this model specifically:

Training datasets (percentages prior to deduplication):

If you use this model, please cite:

@article{chang-etal-2024-goldfish,
  title={Goldfish: Monolingual Language Models for 350 Languages},
  author={Chang, Tyler A. and Arnett, Catherine and Tu, Zhuowen and Bergen, Benjamin K.},
  journal={Preprint},
  year={2024},
  url={https://www.arxiv.org/abs/2408.10441},
}