Jianning Li


2023

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On the Impact of Cross-Domain Data on German Language Models
Amin Dada | Aokun Chen | Cheng Peng | Kaleb Smith | Ahmad Idrissi-Yaghir | Constantin Seibold | Jianning Li | Lars Heiliger | Christoph Friedrich | Daniel Truhn | Jan Egger | Jiang Bian | Jens Kleesiek | Yonghui Wu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023

Traditionally, large language models have been either trained on general web crawls or domain-specific data. However, recent successes of generative large language models, have shed light on the benefits of cross-domain datasets. To examine the significance of prioritizing data diversity over quality, we present a German dataset comprising texts from five domains, along with another dataset aimed at containing high-quality data. Through training a series of models ranging between 122M and 750M parameters on both datasets, we conduct a comprehensive benchmark on multiple downstream tasks. Our findings demonstrate that the models trained on the cross-domain dataset outperform those trained on quality data alone, leading to improvements up to 4.45% over the previous state-of-the-art.