Sasha Luccioni


2023

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Energy and Carbon Considerations of Fine-Tuning BERT
Xiaorong Wang | Clara Na | Emma Strubell | Sorelle Friedler | Sasha Luccioni
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023

Despite the popularity of the pre-train then fine-tune paradigm in the NLP community, existing work quantifying energy costs and associated carbon emissions has largely focused on language model pre-training. Although a single pre-training run draws substantially more energy than fine-tuning, fine-tuning is performed more frequently by many more individual actors, and thus must be accounted for when considering the energy and carbon footprint of NLP. In order to better characterize the role of fine-tuning in the landscape of energy and carbon emissions in NLP, we perform a careful empirical study of the computational costs of fine-tuning across tasks, datasets, hardware infrastructure and measurement modalities. Our experimental results allow us to place fine-tuning energy and carbon costs into perspective with respect to pre-training and inference, and outline recommendations to NLP researchers and practitioners who wish to improve their fine-tuning energy efficiency.

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Detecting Personal Information in Training Corpora: an Analysis
Nishant Subramani | Sasha Luccioni | Jesse Dodge | Margaret Mitchell
Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Trustworthy Natural Language Processing (TrustNLP 2023)

Large language models are trained on increasing quantities of unstructured text, the largest sources of which are scraped from the Web. These Web scrapes are mainly composed of heterogeneous collections of text from multiple domains with minimal documentation. While some work has been done to identify and remove toxic, biased, or sexual language, the topic of personal information (PI) in textual data used for training Natural Language Processing (NLP) models is relatively under-explored. In this work, we draw from definitions of PI across multiple countries to define the first PI taxonomy of its kind, categorized by type and risk level. We then conduct a case study on the Colossal Clean Crawled Corpus (C4) and the Pile, to detect some of the highest-risk personal information, such as email addresses and credit card numbers, and examine the differences between automatic and regular expression-based approaches for their detection. We identify shortcomings in modern approaches for PI detection, and propose a reframing of the problem that is informed by global perspectives and the goals in personal information detection.

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The ROOTS Search Tool: Data Transparency for LLMs
Aleksandra Piktus | Christopher Akiki | Paulo Villegas | Hugo Laurençon | Gérard Dupont | Sasha Luccioni | Yacine Jernite | Anna Rogers
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 3: System Demonstrations)

ROOTS is a 1.6TB multilingual text corpus developed for the training of BLOOM, currently the largest language model explicitly accompanied by commensurate data governance efforts. In continuation of these efforts, we present the ROOTS Search Tool: a search engine over the entire ROOTS corpus offering both fuzzy and exact search capabilities. ROOTS is the largest corpus to date that can be investigated this way. The ROOTS Search Tool is open-sourced and available on Hugging Face Spaces: https://huggingface.co/spaces/bigscience-data/roots-search. We describe our implementation and the possible use cases of our tool.

2022

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Proceedings of The Third Workshop on Simple and Efficient Natural Language Processing (SustaiNLP)
Angela Fan | Iryna Gurevych | Yufang Hou | Zornitsa Kozareva | Sasha Luccioni | Nafise Sadat Moosavi | Sujith Ravi | Gyuwan Kim | Roy Schwartz | Andreas Rücklé
Proceedings of The Third Workshop on Simple and Efficient Natural Language Processing (SustaiNLP)

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Towards Reproducible Machine Learning Research in Natural Language Processing
Ana Lucic | Maurits Bleeker | Samarth Bhargav | Jessica Forde | Koustuv Sinha | Jesse Dodge | Sasha Luccioni | Robert Stojnic
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Tutorial Abstracts

While recent progress in the field of ML has been significant, the reproducibility of these cutting-edge results is often lacking, with many submissions lacking the necessary information in order to ensure subsequent reproducibility. Despite proposals such as the Reproducibility Checklist and reproducibility criteria at several major conferences, the reflex for carrying out research with reproducibility in mind is lacking in the broader ML community. We propose this tutorial as a gentle introduction to ensuring reproducible research in ML, with a specific emphasis on computational linguistics and NLP. We also provide a framework for using reproducibility as a teaching tool in university-level computer science programs.

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You reap what you sow: On the Challenges of Bias Evaluation Under Multilingual Settings
Zeerak Talat | Aurélie Névéol | Stella Biderman | Miruna Clinciu | Manan Dey | Shayne Longpre | Sasha Luccioni | Maraim Masoud | Margaret Mitchell | Dragomir Radev | Shanya Sharma | Arjun Subramonian | Jaesung Tae | Samson Tan | Deepak Tunuguntla | Oskar Van Der Wal
Proceedings of BigScience Episode #5 -- Workshop on Challenges & Perspectives in Creating Large Language Models

Evaluating bias, fairness, and social impact in monolingual language models is a difficult task. This challenge is further compounded when language modeling occurs in a multilingual context. Considering the implication of evaluation biases for large multilingual language models, we situate the discussion of bias evaluation within a wider context of social scientific research with computational work. We highlight three dimensions of developing multilingual bias evaluation frameworks: (1) increasing transparency through documentation, (2) expanding targets of bias beyond gender, and (3) addressing cultural differences that exist between languages. We further discuss the power dynamics and consequences of training large language models and recommend that researchers remain cognizant of the ramifications of developing such technologies.

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Evaluate & Evaluation on the Hub: Better Best Practices for Data and Model Measurements
Leandro Von Werra | Lewis Tunstall | Abhishek Thakur | Sasha Luccioni | Tristan Thrush | Aleksandra Piktus | Felix Marty | Nazneen Rajani | Victor Mustar | Helen Ngo
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations

Evaluation is a key part of machine learning (ML), yet there is a lack of support and tooling to enable its informed and systematic practice. We introduce Evaluate and Evaluation on the Hub—a set of tools to facilitate the evaluation of models and datasets in ML. Evaluate is a library to support best practices for measurements, metrics, and comparisons of data and models. Its goal is to support reproducibility of evaluation, centralize and document the evaluation process, and broaden evaluation to cover more facets of model performance. It includes over 50 efficient canonical implementations for a variety of domains and scenarios, interactive documentation, and the ability to easily share implementations and outcomes. The library is available at https://github.com/huggingface/evaluate. In addition, we introduce Evaluation on the Hub, a platform that enables the large-scale evaluation of over 75,000 models and 11,000 datasets on the Hugging Face Hub, for free, at the click of a button. Evaluation on the Hub is available at https://huggingface.co/autoevaluate.