Russell Authur


2024

Information about pretraining corpora used to train the current best-performing language models is seldom discussed: commercial models rarely detail their data, and even open models are often released without accompanying training data or recipes to reproduce them. As a result, it is challenging to conduct and advance scientific research on language modeling, such as understanding how training data impacts model capabilities and limitations. To facilitate scientific research on language model pretraining, we curate and release Dolma, a three-trillion-token English corpus, built from a diverse mixture of web content, scientific papers, code, public-domain books, social media, and encyclopedic materials. We extensively document Dolma, including its design principles, details about its construction, and a summary of its contents. We present analyses and experimental results on intermediate states of Dolma to share what we have learned about important data curation practices. Finally, we open-source our data curation toolkit to enable reproduction of our work as well as support further research in large-scale data curation.
Language models (LMs) have become ubiquitous in both NLP research and in commercial product offerings. As their commercial importance has surged, the most powerful models have become closed off, gated behind proprietary interfaces, with important details of their training data, architectures, and development undisclosed. Given the importance of these details in scientifically studying these models, including their biases and potential risks, we believe it is essential for the research community to have access to powerful, truly open LMs. To this end, we have built OLMo, a competitive, truly Open Language Model, to enable the scientific study of language models. Unlike most prior efforts that have only released model weights and inference code, we release OLMo alongside open training data and training and evaluation code. We hope this release will empower the open research community and inspire a new wave of innovation.

2023

Despite growing interest in applying natural language processing (NLP) and computer vision (CV) models to the scholarly domain, scientific documents remain challenging to work with. They’re often in difficult-to-use PDF formats, and the ecosystem of models to process them is fragmented and incomplete. We introduce PaperMage, an open-source Python toolkit for analyzing and processing visually-rich, structured scientific documents. PaperMage offers clean and intuitive abstractions for seamlessly representing and manipulating both textual and visual document elements. PaperMage achieves this by integrating disparate state-of-the-art NLP and CV models into a unified framework, and provides turn-key recipes for common scientific document processing use-cases. PaperMage has powered multiple research prototypes of AI applications over scientific documents, along with Semantic Scholar’s large-scale production system for processing millions of PDFs. GitHub: https://github.com/allenai/papermage