Towards Inclusive NLP: Assessing Compressed Multilingual Transformers across Diverse Language Benchmarks

Abstract: Although LLMs have attained significant success in high-resource languages, their capacity in low-resource linguistic environments like Kannada and Arabic is not yet fully understood. This work benchmarking the performance of multilingual and monolingual LLMs across Arabic, English, and Indic languages, with particular emphasis on the effects of model compression strategies such as pruning and quantization. Findings shows significant performance differences driven by linguistic diversity and resource availability on SOTA LLMs as BLOOMZ, AceGPT, Jais, LLaMA-2, XGLM, and AraGPT2. We find that multilingual versions of the model outperform their language-specific counterparts across the board, indicating substantial cross-lingual transfer benefits. Quantization (4-bit and 8-bit) is effective in maintaining model accuracy while promoting efficiency, but aggressive pruning significantly compromises performance, especially in bigger models. Our findings pinpoint key strategies to construct scalable and fair multilingual NLP solutions and underscore the need for interventions to address hallucination and generalization errors in the low-resource setting.