Sherkala-Chat: Building a State-of-the-Art LLM for Kazakh in a Moderately Resourced Setting

Fajri Koto, Rituraj Joshi, Nurdaulet Mukhituly, Yuxia Wang, Zhuohan Xie, Rahul Pal, Daniil Orel, Parvez Mullah, Diana Turmakhan, Maiya Goloburda, Mohammed Kamran, Samujjwal Ghosh, Bokang Jia, Jonibek Mansurov, Mukhammed Togmanov, Debopriyo Banerjee, Nurkhan Laiyk, Akhmed Sakip, Xudong Han, Ekaterina Kochmar et al. (14 additional authors not shown)

Keywords: LLM, LLaMA-3.1, Kazakh, low-resource language modeling, fine-tuning, safety alignment, model evaluation, generative AI

TL;DR: Sherkala-Chat (8B) is a state-of-the-art, instruction-tuned open LLM for Kazakh, excelling in Kazakh language tasks while remaining competitive in English.

Abstract: Llama-3.1-Sherkala-8B-Chat, or Sherkala-Chat (8B) for short, is a state-of-the-art instruction-tuned open generative large language model (LLM) designed for Kazakh. Sherkala-Chat (8B) aims to enhance the inclusivity of LLM advancements for Kazakh speakers. Adapted from the LLaMA-3.1-8B model, Sherkala-Chat (8B) is trained on 45.3B tokens across Kazakh, English, Russian, and Turkish. With 8 billion parameters, it demonstrates strong knowledge and reasoning abilities in Kazakh, significantly outperforming existing open Kazakh and multilingual models of similar scale while achieving competitive performance in English. To ensure effective and responsible alignment, we leverage translated instruction datasets, a Kazakhstan-specific instruction dataset that is automatically constructed and manually verified, and Kazakh-specific safety data. We release Sherkala-Chat (8B) as an open-weight model, along with a detailed description of its training, alignment, and evaluation, to support research and real-world applications for Kazakh speakers.

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Submission Number: 1607