This dataset is a subset of C4 data in TFDS, which might provide effective training of language models even if the data size is small. The detail of how we obtained the subset is described in our paper Extracting Representative Subset from Extensive Text Data for Training Pre-trained Language Models, Information Processing & Management, Volume 60, Issue 3, May 2023 (Accepted Dec 17, 2022)

Neural language models, which have been rapidly developed recently, are an essential technology that plays a fundamental role in the success of the natural language processing (NLP) field. Many studies have been published so far and have clarified that incorporating neural language models as pre-trained models into target task-specific models can dramatically improve performance compared to the case without incorporating pre-trained neural language models (PreLMs). In other words, PreLMs learned from large-scale text datasets can effectively serve as universal features for various NLP tasks.

For PreLMs, several recent studies have verified and experimentally proven that the amount of training data and increasing the model size are the two significant factors that can stably improve the performance, e.g., [1][2][3][4][5]. However, it is also well-known that the efficiency of the performance improvement is often approximately log-linear with respect to the amount of dataset and model size [6][7]. In other words, if we aim to achieve the same level of performance improvement as that obtained by increasing the amount of data from a certain amount, we need to increase the amount of data by a factor of 100. This fact implies that a vast amount of training data is required to build a higher-performance PreLM. Therefore, the computational resources necessary for training may become infeasible. In fact, most of the PreLMs trained from the large-scale dataset are released by large companies with ample computational resources, and it is very difficult for research organizations with few computational resources or research funds, such as many university laboratories, to build relatively high-performance PreLMs.

However, this situation may allow the research on new developments of PreLMs only in certain research institutions. It is inappropriate for open research if researchers cannot widely participate in studying such an important fundamental research topic as PreLMs. Therefore, we focus on the training data of PreLMs and explore a subset that can train a language model with equal or better performance from the data used for training a large-scale PreLM. We refer to the representative subset from the original full training dataset as the "representative dataset" or "RepSet" for short. Suppose it is possible to extract a representative subset. In that case, conducting research on PreLMs with less practical computational resources and research budgets will be possible. It is expected that more researchers will participate, and the field will develop more quickly.

We provide a list of URLs extracted from C4 data. A naive and straightforward way to use this dataset is to download a URL list and extract data from the original CommonCrawl dataset defined in C4. Another choice is to use the URL list via a slight modification of TFDS.

Please cite as:

@article{SUZUKI_IPM2023103249,
  author = {Jun Suzuki and Heiga Zen and Hideto Kazawa},
  title = {Extracting representative subset from extensive text data for training pre-trained language models},
  journal = {Information Processing & Management},
  volume = {60},
  number = {3},
  pages = {103249},
  year = {2023},
  issn = {0306-4573},
  doi = {https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ipm.2022.103249},
  url = {https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0306457322003508},
}