The Impact of Copyrighted Material on Large Language Models: A Norwegian Perspective

The use of copyrighted materials in training generative language models raises critical legal and ethical questions. This paper presents a framework for and the results of empirically assessing the impact of copyrighted materials on the performance of large language models (LLMs) for Norwegian. We found that both books and newspapers contribute positively when the models are evaluated on a diverse set of Norwegian benchmarks, while fiction works possibly lead to decreased performance. Our experiments could inform the creation of a compensation scheme for authors whose works contribute to AI development.

Small Languages, Big Models: A Study of Continual Training on Languages of Norway

Training large language models requires vast amounts of data, posing a challenge for less widely spoken languages like Norwegian and even more so for truly low-resource languages like S\'ami. To address this issue, we present a novel three-stage continual training approach. We also experiment with combining causal and masked language modeling to get more flexible models. Based on our findings, we train, evaluate, and openly release a new large generative language model for Norwegian Bokm\r{a}l, Nynorsk, and Northern S\'ami with 11.4 billion parameters: NorMistral-11B.

GPT or BERT: why not both?

We present a simple way to merge masked language modeling with causal language modeling. This hybrid training objective results in a model that combines the strengths of both modeling paradigms within a single transformer stack: GPT-BERT can be transparently used like any standard causal or masked language model. We test the pretraining process that enables this flexible behavior on the BabyLM Challenge 2024. The results show that the hybrid pretraining outperforms masked-only or causal-only models. We openly release the models, training corpora and code.

BERTs are Generative In-Context Learners

This paper explores the in-context learning capabilities of masked language models, challenging the common view that this ability does not 'emerge' in them. We present an embarrassingly simple inference technique that enables DeBERTa to operate as a generative model without any additional training. Our findings demonstrate that DeBERTa can match and even surpass GPT-3, its contemporary that famously introduced the paradigm of in-context learning. The comparative analysis reveals that the masked and causal language models behave very differently, as they clearly outperform each other on different categories of tasks. This suggests that there is great potential for a hybrid training approach that takes advantage of the strengths of both training objectives.

It's Difficult to be Neutral -- Human and LLM-based Sentiment Annotation of Patient Comments

Sentiment analysis is an important tool for aggregating patient voices, in order to provide targeted improvements in healthcare services. A prerequisite for this is the availability of in-domain data annotated for sentiment. This article documents an effort to add sentiment annotations to free-text comments in patient surveys collected by the Norwegian Institute of Public Health (NIPH). However, annotation can be a time-consuming and resource-intensive process, particularly when it requires domain expertise. We therefore also evaluate a possible alternative to human annotation, using large language models (LLMs) as annotators. We perform an extensive evaluation of the approach for two openly available pretrained LLMs for Norwegian, experimenting with different configurations of prompts and in-context learning, comparing their performance to human annotators. We find that even for zero-shot runs, models perform well above the baseline for binary sentiment, but still cannot compete with human annotators on the full dataset.

More Room for Language: Investigating the Effect of Retrieval on Language Models

Retrieval-augmented language models pose a promising alternative to standard language modeling. During pretraining, these models search in a corpus of documents for contextually relevant information that could aid the language modeling objective. We introduce an 'ideal retrieval' methodology to study these models in a fully controllable setting. We conduct an extensive evaluation to examine how retrieval augmentation affects the behavior of the underlying language model. Among other things, we observe that these models: i) save substantially less world knowledge in their weights, ii) are better at understanding local context and inter-word dependencies, but iii) are worse at comprehending global context.

Not all layers are equally as important: Every Layer Counts BERT

This paper introduces a novel modification of the transformer architecture, tailored for the data-efficient pretraining of language models. This aspect is evaluated by participating in the BabyLM challenge, where our solution won both the strict and strict-small tracks. Our approach allows each transformer layer to select which outputs of previous layers to process. The empirical results verify the potential of this simple modification and show that not all layers are equally as important.

Mean BERTs make erratic language teachers: the effectiveness of latent bootstrapping in low-resource settings

This paper explores the use of latent bootstrapping, an alternative self-supervision technique, for pretraining language models. Unlike the typical practice of using self-supervision on discrete subwords, latent bootstrapping leverages contextualized embeddings for a richer supervision signal. We conduct experiments to assess how effective this approach is for acquiring linguistic knowledge from limited resources. Specifically, our experiments are based on the BabyLM shared task, which includes pretraining on two small curated corpora and an evaluation on four linguistic benchmarks.

Tokenization with Factorized Subword Encoding

In recent years, language models have become increasingly larger and more complex. However, the input representations for these models continue to rely on simple and greedy subword tokenization methods. In this paper, we propose a novel tokenization method that factorizes subwords onto discrete triplets using a VQ-VAE model. The effectiveness of the proposed tokenization method, referred to as the Factorizer, is evaluated on language modeling and morpho-syntactic tasks for 7 diverse languages. Results indicate that this method is more appropriate and robust for morphological tasks than the commonly used byte-pair encoding (BPE) tokenization algorithm.

NoCoLA: The Norwegian Corpus of Linguistic Acceptability

While there has been a surge of large language models for Norwegian in recent years, we lack any tool to evaluate their understanding of grammaticality. We present two new Norwegian datasets for this task. NoCoLA_class is a supervised binary classification task where the goal is to discriminate between acceptable and non-acceptable sentences. On the other hand, NoCoLA_zero is a purely diagnostic task for evaluating the grammatical judgement of a language model in a completely zero-shot manner, i.e. without any further training. In this paper, we describe both datasets in detail, show how to use them for different flavors of language models, and conduct a comparative study of the existing Norwegian language models.