Christopher Akiki


2023

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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.

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GAIA Search: Hugging Face and Pyserini Interoperability for NLP Training Data Exploration
Aleksandra Piktus | Odunayo Ogundepo | Christopher Akiki | Akintunde Oladipo | Xinyu Zhang | Hailey Schoelkopf | Stella Biderman | Martin Potthast | Jimmy Lin
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 3: System Demonstrations)

Noticing the urgent need to provide tools for fast and user-friendly qualitative analysis of large-scale textual corpora of the modern NLP, we propose to turn to the mature and well-tested methods from the domain of Information Retrieval (IR) - a research field with a long history of tackling TB-scale document collections. We discuss how Pyserini - a widely used toolkit for reproducible IR research can be integrated with the Hugging Face ecosystem of open-source AI libraries and artifacts. We leverage the existing functionalities of both platforms while proposing novel features further facilitating their integration. Our goal is to give NLP researchers tools that will allow them to develop retrieval-based instrumentation for their data analytics needs with ease and agility. We include a Jupyter Notebook-based walk through the core interoperability features, available on GitHub: https://github.com/huggingface/gaia. We then demonstrate how the ideas we present can be operationalized to create a powerful tool for qualitative data analysis in NLP. We present GAIA Search - a search engine built following previously laid out principles, giving access to four popular large-scale text collections. GAIA serves a dual purpose of illustrating the potential of methodologies we discuss but also as a standalone qualitative analysis tool that can be leveraged by NLP researchers aiming to understand datasets prior to using them in training. GAIA is hosted live on Hugging Face Spaces: https://huggingface.co/spaces/spacerini/gaia.

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Spacerini: Plug-and-play Search Engines with Pyserini and Hugging Face
Christopher Akiki | Odunayo Ogundepo | Aleksandra Piktus | Xinyu Zhang | Akintunde Oladipo | Jimmy Lin | Martin Potthast
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations

We present Spacerini, a tool that integrates the Pyserini toolkit for reproducible information retrieval research with Hugging Face to enable the seamless construction and deployment of interactive search engines. Spacerini makes state-of-the-art sparse and dense retrieval models more accessible to non-IR practitioners while minimizing deployment effort. This is useful for NLP researchers who want to better understand and validate their research by performing qualitative analyses of training corpora, for IR researchers who want to demonstrate new retrieval models integrated into the growing Pyserini ecosystem, and for third parties reproducing the work of other researchers. Spacerini is open source and includes utilities for loading, preprocessing, indexing, and deploying search engines locally and remotely. We demonstrate a portfolio of 13 search engines created with Spacerini for different use cases.

2022

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Entities, Dates, and Languages: Zero-Shot on Historical Texts with T0
Francesco De Toni | Christopher Akiki | Javier De La Rosa | Clémentine Fourrier | Enrique Manjavacas | Stefan Schweter | Daniel Van Strien
Proceedings of BigScience Episode #5 -- Workshop on Challenges & Perspectives in Creating Large Language Models

In this work, we explore whether the recently demonstrated zero-shot abilities of the T0 model extend to Named Entity Recognition for out-of-distribution languages and time periods. Using a historical newspaper corpus in 3 languages as test-bed, we use prompts to extract possible named entities. Our results show that a naive approach for prompt-based zero-shot multilingual Named Entity Recognition is error-prone, but highlights the potential of such an approach for historical languages lacking labeled datasets. Moreover, we also find that T0-like models can be probed to predict the publication date and language of a document, which could be very relevant for the study of historical texts.