Trained on 100 million words and still in shape: BERT meets British National Corpus

David Samuel, Andrey Kutuzov, Lilja Øvrelid, Erik Velldal


Abstract
While modern masked language models (LMs) are trained on ever larger corpora, we here explore the effects of down-scaling training to a modestly-sized but representative, well-balanced, and publicly available English text source – the British National Corpus. We show that pre-training on this carefully curated corpus can reach better performance than the original BERT model. We argue that this type of corpora has great potential as a language modeling benchmark. To showcase this potential, we present fair, reproducible and data-efficient comparative studies of LMs, in which we evaluate several training objectives and model architectures and replicate previous empirical results in a systematic way. We propose an optimized LM architecture called LTG-BERT.
Anthology ID:
2023.findings-eacl.146
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EACL 2023
Month:
May
Year:
2023
Address:
Dubrovnik, Croatia
Editors:
Andreas Vlachos, Isabelle Augenstein
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1954–1974
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-eacl.146
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.findings-eacl.146
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
David Samuel, Andrey Kutuzov, Lilja Øvrelid, and Erik Velldal. 2023. Trained on 100 million words and still in shape: BERT meets British National Corpus. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EACL 2023, pages 1954–1974, Dubrovnik, Croatia. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Trained on 100 million words and still in shape: BERT meets British National Corpus (Samuel et al., Findings 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-eacl.146.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-eacl.146.mp4