10 accepted papers
Pretraining data design is critically under-documented and often guided by empirically unsupported intuitions. We pretrain models on data curated (1) at different collection times, (2) with varying toxicity and quality filters, and (3) with different domain compositions. First, we find that temporal…
Large language models achieve high performance on many but not all downstream tasks. The interaction between pretraining data and task data is commonly assumed to determine this variance: a task with data that is more similar to a model's pretraining data is assumed to be easier for that model. We t…
Cross-lingual transfer learning is an important property of multilingual large language models (LLMs). But how do LLMs represent relationships between languages? Every language model has an input layer that maps tokens to vectors. This ubiquitous layer of language models is often overlooked. We fin…
Generative language models (LMs) are increasingly used for document class-prediction tasks and promise enormous improvements in cost and efficiency. Existing research often examines simple classification tasks, but the capability of LMs to classify on complex or specialized tasks is less well unders…
A common factor in bias measurement methods is the use of hand-curated seed lexicons, but there remains little guidance for their selection. We gather seeds used in prior work, documenting their common sources and rationales, and in case studies of three English-language corpora, we enumerate the di…
Much of the progress in contemporary NLP has come from learning representations, such as masked language model (MLM) contextual embeddings, that turn challenging problems into simple classification tasks. But how do we quantify and explain this effect? We adapt general tools from computational learn…
Across many data domains, co-occurrence statistics about the joint appearance of objects are powerfully informative. By transforming unsupervised learning problems into decompositions of co-occurrence statistics, spectral algorithms provide transparent and efficient algorithms for posterior inferenc…
Spectral algorithms operate on matrices or tensors of word co-occurrence to learn latent topics. These approaches remove the dependence on the original documents and produce substantial gains in efficiency with provable inference, but at a cost: the models can no longer infer any information about i…
Many online communities present user-contributed responses, such as reviews of products and answers to questions. User-provided helpfulness votes can highlight the most useful responses, but voting is a social process that can gain momentum based on the popularity of responses and the polarity of ex…
Spectral inference provides fast algorithms and provable optimality for latent topic analysis. But for real data these algorithms require additional ad-hoc heuristics, and even then often produce unusable results. We explain this poor performance by casting the problem of topic inference in the fram…