English

Cedille: A large autoregressive French language model

Computation and Language 2022-02-08 v1

Abstract

Scaling up the size and training of autoregressive language models has enabled novel ways of solving Natural Language Processing tasks using zero-shot and few-shot learning. While extreme-scale language models such as GPT-3 offer multilingual capabilities, zero-shot learning for languages other than English remain largely unexplored. Here, we introduce Cedille, a large open source auto-regressive language model, specifically trained for the French language. Our results show that Cedille outperforms existing French language models and is competitive with GPT-3 on a range of French zero-shot benchmarks. Furthermore, we provide an in-depth comparison of the toxicity exhibited by these models, showing that Cedille marks an improvement in language model safety thanks to dataset filtering.

Cite

@article{arxiv.2202.03371,
  title  = {Cedille: A large autoregressive French language model},
  author = {Martin Müller and Florian Laurent},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2202.03371},
  year   = {2022}
}

Comments

8 pages, 1 figure, 7 tables

R2 v1 2026-06-24T09:24:38.973Z