Abstract
Recent advances in language modeling have led to computationally intensive and resource-demanding state-of-the-art models. In an effort towards sustainable practices, we study the impact of pre-training data volume on compact language models. Multiple BERT-based models are trained on gradually increasing amounts of French text. Through fine-tuning on the French Question Answering Dataset (FQuAD), we observe that well-performing models are obtained with as little as 100 MB of text. In addition, we show that past critically low amounts of pre-training data, an intermediate pre-training step on the task-specific corpus does not yield substantial improvements.- Anthology ID:
- 2020.emnlp-main.632
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)
- Month:
- November
- Year:
- 2020
- Address:
- Online
- Editors:
- Bonnie Webber, Trevor Cohn, Yulan He, Yang Liu
- Venue:
- EMNLP
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 7853–7858
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2020.emnlp-main.632
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2020.emnlp-main.632
- Cite (ACL):
- Vincent Micheli, Martin d’Hoffschmidt, and François Fleuret. 2020. On the importance of pre-training data volume for compact language models. In Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), pages 7853–7858, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- On the importance of pre-training data volume for compact language models (Micheli et al., EMNLP 2020)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/dois-2013-emnlp/2020.emnlp-main.632.pdf
- Data
- FQuAD