José Javier Saiz

Also published as: Jose Javier Saiz


2024

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Community OSCAR: A Community Effort for Multilingual Web Data
Manuel Brack | Malte Ostendorff | Pedro Ortiz Suarez | José Javier Saiz | Iñaki Lacunza Castilla | Jorge Palomar-Giner | Alexander Shvets | Patrick Schramowski | Georg Rehm | Marta Villegas | Kristian Kersting
Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Multilingual Representation Learning (MRL 2024)

The development of large language models (LLMs) relies heavily on extensive, high-quality datasets. Publicly available datasets focus predominantly on English, leaving other language communities behind. To address this issue, we introduce Community OSCAR, a multilingual dataset initiative designed to address the gap between English and non-English data availability. Through a collective effort, Community OSCAR covers over 150 languages with 45 billion documents, totaling over 345 TiB of data. Initial results indicate that Community OSCAR provides valuable raw data for training LLMs and enhancing the performance of multilingual models. This work aims to contribute to the ongoing advancements in multilingual NLP and to support a more inclusive AI ecosystem by making high-quality, multilingual data more accessible to those working with low-resource languages.

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A CURATEd CATalog: Rethinking the Extraction of Pretraining Corpora for Mid-Resourced Languages
Jorge Palomar-Giner | Jose Javier Saiz | Ferran Espuña | Mario Mina | Severino Da Dalt | Joan Llop | Malte Ostendorff | Pedro Ortiz Suarez | Georg Rehm | Aitor Gonzalez-Agirre | Marta Villegas
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)

We present and describe two language resources in this paper: CATalog 1.0, the largest text corpus in Catalan to date, and CURATE (Corpus Utility for RAting TExt), a modular, parallelizable pipeline used for processing and scoring documents based on text quality that we have optimised to run in High Performance Cluster (HPC) environments. In the coming sections we describe our data preprocessing pipeline at length; traditional pipelines usually implement a set of binary filters such that a given document is either in or out. In our experience with Catalan, in lower-resource settings it is more practical to instead assign a document a soft score to allow for more flexible decision-making. We describe how the document score is calculated and highlight its interpretability by showing that it is significantly correlated with human judgements as obtained from a comparative judgement experiment. We additionally describe the different subcorpora that make up CATalog 1.0.