Evaluation of Web-Crawled Corpora for Language Models

Belangrijkste concepten

Quality of web-crawled corpora does not significantly impact language model training.

Samenvatting

Large, curated, web-crawled corpora are crucial for training language models like GPT and XLM-RoBERTa. However, little attention has been given to the quality of these corpora. A study compared four major web-crawled corpora across eleven European languages. MaCoCu and OSCAR were found to have superior quality, while CC100 performed best in downstream tasks despite lower quality. The study revealed that data set quality did not play a significant role in training language models.

Statistieken

CC100 corpus covers 100 languages with sizes ranging from 55.6 billion tokens in English to 10 million tokens in Sundanese.
mC4 corpus contains approximately 6.3 trillion tokens across 101 languages.
OSCAR corpus includes data from the last Common Crawl dumps and covers 152 languages.
MaCoCu corpus consists of about 17.3 billion tokens across 11 low-resourced European languages.

Citaten

"Quality of web-crawled corpora does not seem to play a significant role when training LMs."
"We conclude that data set quality (as judged by humans) of web-crawled corpora does not seem to play a significant role in training language models."

Belangrijkste Inzichten Gedestilleerd Uit

Do Language Models Care About Text Quality? Evaluating Web-Crawled Corpora Across 11 Languages

by Rik ... om arxiv.org 03-14-2024

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2403.08693.pdf

Diepere vragen

How can the findings of this study be applied to improve the quality of web-crawled corpora?

The findings of this study provide valuable insights into the quality assessment of web-crawled corpora. By understanding that data set quality, as judged by humans, may not significantly impact language model training performance, researchers and developers can focus on other aspects when curating and cleaning corpora. However, it is essential to continue exploring more sophisticated annotation schemes and evaluation methodologies to ensure a comprehensive understanding of corpus quality. Additionally, leveraging automated tools for data cleaning and filtering could help enhance the overall quality of web-crawled corpora.

What implications do these results have for future developments in language model training?

These results suggest that while human-annotated data set quality may not directly influence language model performance in downstream tasks, there are still important considerations for future developments in language model training. Researchers should continue exploring ways to optimize pretraining strategies, fine-tuning techniques, and task-specific adaptations to improve overall model performance. Moreover, focusing on diverse evaluation tasks across multiple languages can provide a more comprehensive assessment of language models' capabilities.

How might the focus on data set size influence the performance of language models in real-world applications?

The focus on data set size plays a crucial role in determining the performance of language models in real-world applications. Larger datasets generally lead to better model generalization and improved task performance due to increased exposure to diverse linguistic patterns and contexts. However, it is essential to balance dataset size with data quality considerations during corpus curation processes. Optimal dataset sizes tailored to specific languages or tasks can help mitigate overfitting issues while enhancing the robustness and effectiveness of language models deployed in practical applications.