Documenting Large Webtext Corpora: A Case Study on the Colossal Clean Crawled Corpus

Jesse Dodge, Maarten Sap, Ana Marasović, William Agnew, Gabriel Ilharco, Dirk Groeneveld, Margaret Mitchell, Matt Gardner


Abstract
Large language models have led to remarkable progress on many NLP tasks, and researchers are turning to ever-larger text corpora to train them. Some of the largest corpora available are made by scraping significant portions of the internet, and are frequently introduced with only minimal documentation. In this work we provide some of the first documentation for the Colossal Clean Crawled Corpus (C4; Raffel et al., 2020), a dataset created by applying a set of filters to a single snapshot of Common Crawl. We begin by investigating where the data came from, and find a significant amount of text from unexpected sources like patents and US military websites. Then we explore the content of the text itself, and find machine-generated text (e.g., from machine translation systems) and evaluation examples from other benchmark NLP datasets. To understand the impact of the filters applied to create this dataset, we evaluate the text that was removed, and show that blocklist filtering disproportionately removes text from and about minority individuals. Finally, we conclude with some recommendations for how to created and document web-scale datasets from a scrape of the internet.
Anthology ID:
2021.emnlp-main.98
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2021
Address:
Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic
Editors:
Marie-Francine Moens, Xuanjing Huang, Lucia Specia, Scott Wen-tau Yih
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1286–1305
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.98
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.emnlp-main.98
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jesse Dodge, Maarten Sap, Ana Marasović, William Agnew, Gabriel Ilharco, Dirk Groeneveld, Margaret Mitchell, and Matt Gardner. 2021. Documenting Large Webtext Corpora: A Case Study on the Colossal Clean Crawled Corpus. In Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 1286–1305, Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Documenting Large Webtext Corpora: A Case Study on the Colossal Clean Crawled Corpus (Dodge et al., EMNLP 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.98.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.98.mp4
Data
C4GLUEMRPCMultiNLIQNLIWebTextWikiBio