Evaluation of Medium-Sized Language Models in German and English Language

Abstract

Large language models (LLMs) have garnered significant attention, but the definition of “large” lacks clarity. This paper focuses on medium-sized language models (MLMs), defined as having at least six billion parameters but less than 100 billion. The study evaluates MLMs regarding zero-shot generative question answering in German and English language, which requires models to provide elaborate answers without external document retrieval (RAG). The paper introduces an own test dataset and presents results from human evaluation. Results show that combining the best answers from different MLMs yielded an overall correct answer rate of 82.7% which is better than the 60.9% of ChatGPT. The best English MLM achieved 71.8% and has 33B parameters, which highlights the importance of using appropriate training data for fine-tuning rather than solely relying on the number of parameters. The best German model also surpasses ChatGPT for the equivalent dataset. More fine-grained feedback should be used to further improve the quality of answers. The open source community is quickly closing the gap to the best commercial models.

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