Data, Data Everywhere: A Guide for Pretraining Dataset Construction

Jupinder Parmar, Shrimai Prabhumoye, Joseph Jennings, Bo Liu, Aastha Jhunjhunwala, Zhilin Wang, Mostofa Patwary, Mohammad Shoeybi, Bryan Catanzaro


Abstract
The impressive capabilities of recent language models can be largely attributed to the multi-trillion token pretraining datasets that they are trained on. However, model developers fail to disclose their construction methodology which has lead to a lack of open information on how to develop effective pretraining sets. To address this issue, we perform the first systematic study across the entire pipeline of pretraining set construction. First, we run ablations on existing techniques for pretraining set development to identify which methods translate to the largest gains in model accuracy on downstream evaluations. Then, we categorize the most widely used data source, web crawl snapshots, across the attributes of toxicity, quality, type of speech, and domain. Finally, we show how such attribute information can be used to further refine and improve the quality of a pretraining set. These findings constitute an actionable set of steps that practitioners can use to develop high quality pretraining sets.
Anthology ID:
2024.emnlp-main.596
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Yaser Al-Onaizan, Mohit Bansal, Yun-Nung Chen
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
10671–10695
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.596
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jupinder Parmar, Shrimai Prabhumoye, Joseph Jennings, Bo Liu, Aastha Jhunjhunwala, Zhilin Wang, Mostofa Patwary, Mohammad Shoeybi, and Bryan Catanzaro. 2024. Data, Data Everywhere: A Guide for Pretraining Dataset Construction. In Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 10671–10695, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Data, Data Everywhere: A Guide for Pretraining Dataset Construction (Parmar et al., EMNLP 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.596.pdf