Joseph Viviano


2021

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What’s in the Box? An Analysis of Undesirable Content in the Common Crawl Corpus
Alexandra Luccioni | Joseph Viviano
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 2: Short Papers)

Whereas much of the success of the current generation of neural language models has been driven by increasingly large training corpora, relatively little research has been dedicated to analyzing these massive sources of textual data. In this exploratory analysis, we delve deeper into the Common Crawl, a colossal web corpus that is extensively used for training language models. We find that it contains a significant amount of undesirable content, including hate speech and sexually explicit content, even after filtering procedures. We discuss the potential impacts of this content on language models and conclude with future research directions and a more mindful approach to corpus collection and analysis.