Meltemi: The first open Large Language Model for Greek

TL;DR

This paper introduces Meltemi, the first open large language model for Greek, with 7 billion parameters, trained on Greek data, and includes an instruction-tuned version for conversational tasks, emphasizing alignment and safety.

Contribution

It presents the development of Meltemi 7B and Meltemi 7B Instruct, the first open Greek LLM and instruction-tuned model, with dedicated Greek datasets and safety measures.

Findings

Meltemi 7B performs well on Greek NLP tasks.

Meltemi 7B Instruct demonstrates effective instruction-following.

Models are publicly available for research and development.

Abstract

We describe the development and capabilities of Meltemi 7B, the first open Large Language Model for the Greek language. Meltemi 7B has 7 billion parameters and is trained on a 40 billion token Greek corpus. For the development of Meltemi 7B, we adapt Mistral, by continuous pretraining on the Greek Corpus. Meltemi 7B contains up-to-date information up to September 2023. Furthermore, we have translated and curated a Greek instruction corpus, which has been used for the instruction-tuning of a chat model, named Meltemi 7B Instruct. Special care has been given to the alignment and the removal of toxic content for the Meltemi 7B Instruct. The developed models are evaluated on a broad set of collected evaluation corpora, and examples of prompts and responses are presented. Both Meltemi 7B and Meltemi 7B Instruct are available at https://huggingface.co/ilsp under the Apache 2.0 license.