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arXiv · 2508.09115

SinLlama -- A Large Language Model for Sinhala

H. W. K. Aravinda·Rashad Sirajudeen·Samith Karunathilake·Nisansa de Silva·Surangika Ranathunga·Rishemjit Kaur
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Abstract

Low-resource languages such as Sinhala are often overlooked by open-source Large Language Models (LLMs). In this research, we extend an existing multilingual LLM (Llama-3-8B) to better serve Sinhala. We enhance the LLM tokenizer with Sinhala specific vocabulary and perform continual pre-training on a cleaned 10 million Sinhala corpus, resulting in the SinLlama model. This is the very first decoder-based open-source LLM with explicit Sinhala support. When SinLlama was instruction fine-tuned for three text classification tasks, it outperformed base and instruct variants of Llama-3-8B by a significant margin.

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H. W. K. Aravinda, Rashad Sirajudeen, Samith Karunathilake, Nisansa de Silva, Surangika Ranathunga, Rishemjit Kaur. 2026-08-31. SinLlama -- A Large Language Model for Sinhala. https://doi.org/10.1109/mercon67903.2025.11217094

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