A group of researchers from the Sea AI Lab and Singapore University of Technology and Design have developed Sailor, a sophisticated collection of language models designed to ease the process of language translation in linguistically-diverse regions such as Southeast Asia. This solution distinguishes itself by accurately addressing the nuances of languages such as Indonesian, Thai, Vietnamese, Malay, and Lao, significantly improving their applicability in real-life situations.
Constructed using the robust Qwen 1.5 models, Sailor is nurtured on an extensive corpus consisting of 200 to 400 billion tokens, with a particular emphasis on the Southeast Asian languages. This extensive training enables Sailor to adequately comprehend and generate text across a range of languages, establishing a new standard in the sphere of multilingual language technology. Additionally, Sailor offers diverse model variants, ranging from 0.5B to 7B in size, to satisfy varying computational requirements, thus ensuring widespread accessibility and usefulness.
The power of the Sailor models is evident in their impressive performance in various benchmark tasks, reflecting their excellent design and deployment. In the question-answering category, for instance, the Sailor-7B variant scored 57.88% on the XQuAD (Thai) benchmark, 60.53% on TydiQA (Indonesian), and 53.81% on XQuAD (Vietnamese), outpacing its predecessors and setting new standards for accuracy.
In tasks associated with reasoning and comprehension, Sailor also demonstrated impressive results. The upper-tier Sailor-7B model achieved an accuracy of 72.2% across Thai, Indonesian, and Vietnamese tasks in the XCOPA benchmark, proving its capacity to interpret and reason with complex text. In the reading comprehension task, evaluated through the Belebele benchmark, Sailor-7B recorded notably high scores.
Its impressive performance confirms that Sailor’s introduction represents a significant advancement in the quest for comprehensive language models that can accurately navigate the complex linguistic landscape of Southeast Asia. Sailor’s success is a testament to the potential of specialized models in enhancing our understanding and interaction in the field of computational linguistics. By pairing innovative methodological techniques with an inclusive approach to language diversity, Sailor addresses the urgent demand for specialized language technologies in this region and provides a template for future developments.
The researchers behind the project have extended their gratitude towards the linguistics community and have urged followers and users to build upon their work. They’ve maintained transparency regarding their work through their Github repositories, blogs, and newsletters where more information can be found. Links to free AI courses are also made available for those interested in studying further about the subject.
