Fietje: An open, efficient LLM for Dutch

TL;DR

Fietje is an open-source, efficient Dutch language model based on Phi 2, demonstrating competitive performance and emphasizing transparency, with rapid progress in Dutch NLP capabilities through small models.

Contribution

The paper introduces Fietje, a fully open-source Dutch LLM based on Phi 2, showcasing competitive results and emphasizing transparency and reproducibility.

Findings

Fietje achieves competitive results with larger models.

Small models now outperform older, larger Dutch models.

Open-source approach promotes accessibility and reproducibility.

Abstract

This paper introduces Fietje, a family of small language models (SLMs) specifically designed for the Dutch language. The model is based on Phi 2, an English-centric model of 2.7 billion parameters. Fietje demonstrated competitive results with larger language models upon its release. A core emphasis of this work is transparency and reproducibility: Fietje is fully open-source, with model weights, datasets, training, and evaluation code all publicly accessible. The paper discusses the performance of Fietje and many other models on an extensive evaluation suite of benchmarks on reasoning, sentiment analysis, world knowledge, linguistic acceptability and word sense disambiguation. Evaluation results illustrate the rapid progress in the field of LLMs, where recent small models outperform older, larger models that were fine-tuned for Dutch. This trend signals an exciting future for Dutch language processing, suggesting that even compact LLMs are becoming increasingly capable. Furthermore, ongoing and future efforts to adapt LLMs to Dutch are poised to enhance these models even further, broadening their applicability and accessibility. Fietje is only an intermediate step in improving accessibility to language technology for users of the Dutch language.