In this work, we introduce EMMA-500, a large-scale multilingual language model continue-trained on texts across 546 languages designed for enhanced multilingual performance, focusing on improving language coverage for low-resource languages. To facilitate continual pre-training, we compile the MaLA corpus, a comprehensive multilingual dataset enriched with curated datasets across diverse domains. Leveraging this corpus, we conduct extensive continual pre-training of the Llama 2 7B model, resulting in EMMA-500, which demonstrates robust performance across a wide collection of benchmarks, including a comprehensive set of multilingual tasks. Our results highlight the effectiveness of continual pre-training in expanding large language models' language capacity, particularly for underrepresented languages, demonstrating significant gains in cross-lingual transfer, task generalization, and language adaptability. We release the MaLA corpus, EMMA-500 model weights, scripts, and model generations.
@article{arxiv.2409.17892,
title = {EMMA-500: Enhancing Massively Multilingual Adaptation of Large Language Models},
author = {Shaoxiong Ji and Zihao Li and Jaakko Paavola and Peiqin Lin and Pinzhen Chen and Dayyán O'Brien and Hengyu Luo and Hinrich Schütze and Jörg Tiedemann and Barry Haddow},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2409.17892},
year = {2025}
}