Cited by 316Natural Language Processing TechniquesTopic ModelingComputational and Text Analysis Methods

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

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Dodge, Jesse, Sap, Maarten, Marasović, Ana, Agnew, William, Ilharco, Gabriel, Groeneveld, Dirk, Mitchell, Margaret, Gardner, Matt·2021·Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Abstract

Jesse Dodge, Maarten Sap, Ana Marasović, William Agnew, Gabriel Ilharco, Dirk Groeneveld, Margaret Mitchell, Matt Gardner. Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. 2021.

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Crossref · 10.18653/v1/2021.emnlp-main.98

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66 of 69 references verified0 citation errors · 3 not checkable

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  • Large language models inherit stereotypes, misrepresentations, derogatory and exclusionary language, and other denigrating behaviors that disproportionately affect already-vulnerable and marginalized communities.

    “Typically trained on an enormous scale of uncurated Internet-based data, LLMs inherit stereotypes, misrepresentations, derogatory and exclusionary language, and other denigrating behaviors that disproportionately affect already-vulnerable and marginalized communities (Bender et al. 2021; Dodge et al. 2021; Sheng et al. 2021b).”

    From Bias and Fairness in Large Language Models: A Survey (2024) · cites this paper as Dodge et al. 2021

    Section 4.3, “Demographic Biases in C4.EN” (page not provided), reports ethnicity bias in a model and a corresponding sentiment bias in its pretraining corpus. The “Social biases and representational harms” section explicitly says the paper has not shown a causal link between the corpus statistics and downstream bias. It also reports disproportionate exclusion of minority-related text, but does not establish the broader claim that LLMs inherit derogatory or exclusionary language and other denigrating behaviors. (LLM, conf=0.87)

    Experimental — accuracy not yet measured
  • Large language models are typically trained on an enormous scale of uncurated Internet-based data.

    “Typically trained on an enormous scale of uncurated Internet-based data, LLMs inherit stereotypes, misrepresentations, derogatory and exclusionary language, and other denigrating behaviors that disproportionately affect already-vulnerable and marginalized communities (Bender et al. 2021; Dodge et al. 2021; Sheng et al. 2021b).”

    From Bias and Fairness in Large Language Models: A Survey (2024) · cites this paper as Dodge et al. 2021

    The Introduction says the largest models train on substantial portions of the public internet, and §7 Related Work gives GPT-3 as an example trained on large amounts of web text. But the paper describes that text as filtered, including C4’s multiple cleaning steps, so it does not support calling the training data wholly uncurated. (LLM, conf=0.86)

    Experimental — accuracy not yet measured
  • Very recent research has begun to analyze dataset values, question assumptions around dataset use, unpack what is represented in ML datasets, and establish basics of how an organized dataset lifecycle might proceed.

    “Very recent research - most published within the last year - has begun to analyze dataset values [18, 40], question assumptions around dataset use [100], unpack what is represented in ML datasets [43, 88, 124] and establish basics of how an organized dataset lifecycle might proceed [74].”
  • LLM datasets are poorly documented with little understanding of their ultimate makeup.

    “LLM datasets are poorly documented with little understanding of their ultimate makeup62.”
  • The pre-release increase in specific terms could occur naturally and may already be reflected in the pretraining corpora of later LLMs, which were built from time-specific web snapshots (e.g., C4, April 2019).

    “The pre-release increase in specific terms could occur naturally and may already be reflected in the pretraining corpora of later LLMs, which were built from time-specific web snapshots (e.g., C4, April 2019 [31]).”

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Cites

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Research works printed but not linked: 8

  1. Tom Brown, Benjamin Mann, Nick Ryder, Melanie Subbiah, Jared D Kaplan, Prafulla Dhariwal, Arvind Neelakantan, Pranav Shyam, Girish Sastry, Amanda Askell, Sandhini Agarwal, Ariel Herbert- Voss, Gretchen Krueger, Tom Henighan, Rewon Child, Aditya Ramesh, Daniel Ziegler, Jeffrey Wu, Clemens Winter, Chris Hesse, Mark Chen, Eric Sigler, Mateusz Litwin, Scott Gray, Benjamin Chess, Jack Clark, Christopher Berner, Sam McCandlish, Alec Radford, Ilya Sutskever, and Dario Amodei. 2020. Language models are few-shot learners. In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, volume 33, pages 1877-1901.
  2. Isaac Caswell, Julia Kreutzer, Lisa Wang, Ahsan Wa- hab, D. V. Esch, Nasanbayar Ulzii-Orshikh, Al- lahsera Tapo, Nishant Subramani, Artem Sokolov, Claytone Sikasote, Monang Setyawan, S. Sarin, Sokhar Samb, B. Sagot, C. Rivera, Annette Rios Gonzales, Isabel Papadimitriou, S. Osei, Pedro Javier Ortiz Suárez, Iroro Orife, Kelechi Ogueji, Rubungo Andre Niyongabo, Toan Q. Nguyen, Math- ias Muller, A. Muller, S. Muhammad, N. Muham- mad, Ayanda Mnyakeni, Jamshidbek Mirzakhalov, Tapiwanashe Matangira, Colin Leong, Nze Lawson, Sneha Kudugunta, Yacine Jernite, M. Jenny, Orhan Firat, Bonaventure F. P. Dossou, Sakhile Dlamini, N. D. Silva, Sakine cCabuk Balli, Stella Rose Biderman, Alessia Battisti, A. Baruwa, Ankur Bapna, Pallavi Baljekar, Israel Abebe Azime, Ayo- dele Awokoya, Duygu Ataman, Orevaoghene Ahia, Oghenefego Ahia, Sweta Agrawal, and Mofetoluwa Adeyemi. 2021. Quality at a glance: An audit of web-crawled multilingual datasets. In Proceedings of the AfricanNLP Workshop.
  3. Kenneth Church and Patrick Hanks. 1990. Word as- sociation norms, mutual information, and lexicogra- phy. Computational linguistics, 16(1):22-29.
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  5. Colin Raffel, Noam Shazeer, Adam Roberts, Katherine 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 trans- former. Journal of Machine Learning Research.
  6. Jonathan Rosa. 2019. Looking like a language, sound- ing like a race. Oxford University Press. · DOI
  7. Rachael Tatman. 2020. What i won't build. WiNLP Workshop at ACL.
  8. Rowan Zellers, Ari Holtzman, Hannah Rashkin, Yonatan Bisk, Ali Farhadi, Franziska Roesner, and Yejin Choi. 2019. Defending against neural fake news. In NeurIPS.

Cited by

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Authors
Dodge, J., Sap, M., Marasović, A., Agnew, W., Ilharco, G., Groeneveld, D., Mitchell, M., & Gardner, M.
Affiliations
University of Washington (US)
Venue
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Published
2021
Pages
1286-1305
OpenAlex
W3204096139
Cited by
306
References
65
Citations by year
2026: 76 · 2025: 77 · 2024: 54 · 2023: 65 · 2022: 33 · 2021: 1
FWCI
17.67
Type
conference paper
Language
en
Open access
Licence
cc-by
Locations
  • Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP) (publishedVersion, cc-by)
  • arXiv (Cornell University) (submittedVersion)
  • arXiv (Cornell University) (cc-by)
Funders
Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence
Topics
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Natural Language Processing Techniques
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Topic Modeling
  • Social Sciences › General Social Sciences › Computational and Text Analysis Methods
Keywords
web crawling, corpus annotation

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