The Pile: An 800GB Dataset of Diverse Text for Language Modeling
Preprint, 2021.
Recent work has demonstrated that increased training dataset diversity improves general cross-domain knowledge and downstream generalization capability for large-scale language models. With this in mind, we present >the Pile: an 825 GiB English text corpus targeted at training large-scale language models. The Pile is constructed from 22 diverse high-quality subsets – both existing and newly constructed – many of which derive from academic or professional sources. Our evaluation of the untuned performance of GPT-2 and GPT-3 on the Pile shows that these models struggle on many of its components, such as academic writing. Conversely, models trained on the Pile improve significantly over both Raw CC and CC-100 on all components of the Pile, while improving performance on downstream evaluations. Through an in-depth exploratory analysis, we document potentially concerning aspects of the data for prospective users. We make publicly available the code used in its construction.
Citation: Leo Gao, Stella Biderman, Sid Black, Laurence Golding, Travis Hoppe, Charles Foster, Jason Phang, Horace He, Anish Thite, Noa Nabeshima, Shawn Presser, Connor Leahy. The Pile: An 800GB Dataset of Diverse Text for Language Modeling. Preprint, 2021.