Cited by 107Topic ModelingNatural Language Processing TechniquesDomain Adaptation and Few-Shot Learning

When Do You Need Billions of Words of Pretraining Data?

Open access
Zhang, Yian, Warstadt, Alex, Li, Xiaocheng, Bowman, Samuel R.·2021·Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Abstract

Yian Zhang, Alex Warstadt, Xiaocheng Li, Samuel R. Bowman. Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2021.

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.18653/v1/2021.acl-long.90

Cites

63 of 64 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Claims other papers make about this one

Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?

  • When restricted to developmentally plausible data volumes, language models no longer perform well on benchmarks for human-like syntactic and semantic behavior.

    “When restricted to developmentally plausible data volumes, language models no longer perform well on benchmarks for human-like syntactic and semantic behavior (van Schijndel et al., 2019;Zhang et al., 2021).”

    From Findings of the BabyLM Challenge: Sample-Efficient Pretraining on Developmentally Plausible Corpora (2023) · cites this paper as Zhang et al., 2021

    The Results section reports that with 100 million words of pretraining data, performance on the BLiMP grammaticality benchmark was within nine accuracy points of humans. The Conclusion says syntactic and semantic abilities largely saturate after 10–100 million words, a volume it describes as comparable to data available to human learners. This contradicts the claim that models at developmentally plausible volumes no longer perform well on those benchmarks. (LLM, conf=0.90)

    Checked by a reasoning model — may be wrong.

    Experimental — accuracy not yet measured

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Cites

Flagged first, then by citations

5 of the 69 references couldn’t be matched to a known paper.

Research works printed but not linked: 7

  1. Roy Bar Haim, Ido Dagan, Bill Dolan, Lisa Ferro, Danilo Giampiccolo, Bernardo Magnini, and Idan Szpektor. 2006. The second PASCAL recognising textual entailment challenge. In Proceedings of the Second PASCAL Challenges Workshop on Recognis- ing Textual Entailment.
  2. Luisa Bentivogli, Ido Dagan, Hoa Trang Dang, Danilo Giampiccolo, and Bernardo Magnini. 2009. The fifth PASCAL recognizing textual entailment chal- lenge. In Textual Analysis Conference (TAC).
  3. Hady Elsahar, Pavlos Vougiouklis, Arslen Remaci, Christophe Gravier, Jonathon Hare, Frederique Laforest, and Elena Simperl. 2018. T-rex: A large scale alignment of natural language with knowledge base triples. In Proceedings of the Eleventh Interna- tional Conference on Language Resources and Eval- uation (LREC-2018).
  4. Charles Lovering, Rohan Jha, Tal Linzen, and El- lie Pavlick. 2021. Predicting inductive biases of fine-tuned models. In International Conference on Learning Representations.
  5. Colin Raffel, Noam Shazeer, Adam Roberts, Kather- ine Lee, Sharan Narang, Michael Matena, Yanqi Zhou, Wei Li, and Peter J. Liu. 2020. Exploring the limits of transfer learning with a unified text-to- text transformer. Journal of Machine Learning Re- search, 21(140):1-67.
  6. Melissa Roemmele, Cosmin Adrian Bejan, and An- drew S. Gordon. 2011. Choice of plausible alterna- tives: An evaluation of commonsense causal reason- ing. In 2011 AAAI Spring Symposium Series.
  7. Alex Wang and Kyunghyun Cho. 2019. BERT has a mouth, and it must speak: BERT as a Markov random field language model. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Methods for Optimizing and Eval- uating Neural Language Generation, pages 30-36, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Association for Computa- tional Linguistics. · DOI

Cited by

Sorted by citations

Authors
Zhang, Y., Warstadt, A., Li, X., & Bowman, S. R.
Affiliations
New York University (US)
Venue
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Published
2021
Pages
1112-1125
OpenAlex
W3176198948
Cited by
85
References
69
Citations by year
2026: 3 · 2025: 7 · 2024: 9 · 2023: 40 · 2022: 16 · 2021: 10
FWCI
8.66
Type
conference paper
Language
en
Open access
Licence
cc-by
Funders
National Science Foundation (1850208)
Topics
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Topic Modeling
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Natural Language Processing Techniques
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Domain Adaptation and Few-Shot Learning
Keywords
pre-training, language models, training data requirements

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review