Investigating Recent Large Language Models for Vietnamese Machine Reading Comprehension

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable proficiency in Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC) tasks; however, their effectiveness for low-resource languages like Vietnamese remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we fine-tune and evaluate two state-of-the-art LLMs: Llama 3 (8B parameters) and Gemma (7B parameters), on ViMMRC, a Vietnamese MRC dataset. By utilizing Quantized Low-Rank Adaptation (QLoRA), we efficiently fine-tune these models and compare their performance against powerful LLM-based baselines. Although our fine-tuned models are smaller than GPT-3 and GPT-3.5, they outperform both traditional BERT-based approaches and these larger models. This demonstrates the effectiveness of our fine-tuning process, showcasing how modern LLMs can surpass the capabilities of older models like BERT while still being suitable for deployment in resource-constrained environments. Through intensive analyses, we explore various aspects of model performance, providing valuable insights into adapting LLMs for low-resource languages like Vietnamese. Our study contributes to the advancement of natural language processing in low-resource languages, and we make our fine-tuned models publicly available at:this https URL.

@article{nguyen2025_2503.18062,
  title={ Investigating Recent Large Language Models for Vietnamese Machine Reading Comprehension },
  author={ Anh Duc Nguyen and Hieu Minh Phi and Anh Viet Ngo and Long Hai Trieu and Thai Phuong Nguyen },
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2503.18062},
  year={ 2025 }
}