Small Languages, Big Models: A Study of Continual Training on Languages of Norway
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Abstract (arXiv)
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 Northern S'ami. To address this issue, we present a novel three-stage continual training approach that substantially improves the downstream performance together with the inference efficiency for the target languages. Based on our findings, we train, evaluate, and openly release a new generative language model for Norwegian Bokmral, Nynorsk, and Northern S'ami with 11.4 billion parameters: NorMistral-11B.
Key facts. Cited by 12 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 47 of its 75 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 9 Dec 2024.
Builds on
47 of 75 references.
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Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2024: 1; 2025: 7; 2026: 4.
12 papers.
- 2024The Impact of Copyrighted Material on Large Language Models: A Norwegian Perspectivecited by 8
- 2025NorEval: A Norwegian Language Understanding and Generation Evaluation Benchmarkcited by 8
- 2025Grow Up and Merge: Scaling Strategies for Efficient Language Adaptationcited by 3
- 2026Preferences for Idiomatic Language are Acquired Slowly -- and Forgotten Quickly: A Case Study on Swedishcited by 3
- 2025Benchmarking Abstractive Summarisation: A Dataset of Human-authored Summaries of Norwegian News Articlescited by 2
- 2025A Collection of Question Answering Datasets for Norwegiancited by 2
- 2025Multi-label Scandinavian Language Identification (SLIDE)cited by 2
- 2025Teaching Old Tokenizers New Words: Efficient Tokenizer Adaptation for Pre-trained Modelscited by 2
- 2026EstLLM: Enhancing Estonian Capabilities in Multilingual LLMs via Continued Pretraining and Post-Trainingcited by 1
- 2025Fluent Alignment with Disfluent Judges: Post-training for Lower-resource Languagescited by 0
- 2026Reading the News: Adapting Large Language Models to Swedish Journalism Through Continued Pre-Trainingcited by 0
- 2026To Each Language Its Tokenizer: Modular Tokenizers for Efficient Multilingual LLMscited by 0
- 2026To Each Language Its Tokenizer: Modular Tokenizers for Efficient Multilingual LLMs14 Sep 2026
- 2026Reading the News: Adapting Large Language Models to Swedish Journalism Through Continued Pre-Training31 Aug 2026
- 2026EstLLM: Enhancing Estonian Capabilities in Multilingual LLMs via Continued Pretraining and Post-Training2 Mar 2026
- 2026Preferences for Idiomatic Language are Acquired Slowly -- and Forgotten Quickly: A Case Study on Swedish3 Feb 2026
- 2025Grow Up and Merge: Scaling Strategies for Efficient Language Adaptation11 Dec 2025
- 2025Fluent Alignment with Disfluent Judges: Post-training for Lower-resource Languages9 Dec 2025
- 2025Teaching Old Tokenizers New Words: Efficient Tokenizer Adaptation for Pre-trained Models3 Dec 2025
- 2025NorEval: A Norwegian Language Understanding and Generation Evaluation Benchmark10 Apr 2025
- 2025Multi-label Scandinavian Language Identification (SLIDE)10 Feb 2025
- 2025A Collection of Question Answering Datasets for Norwegian19 Jan 2025
- 2025Benchmarking Abstractive Summarisation: A Dataset of Human-authored Summaries of Norwegian News Articles13 Jan 2025
- 2024The Impact of Copyrighted Material on Large Language Models: A Norwegian Perspective12 Dec 2024