On the Impact of Cross-Domain Data on German Language Models

11 Oct 2023 · Amin Dada, Aokun Chen, Cheng Peng, Kaleb E Smith, Ahmad Idrissi-Yaghir, Constantin Marc Seibold, Jianning Li, Lars Heiliger, Xi Yang, Christoph M. Friedrich, Daniel Truhn, Jan Egger, Jiang Bian, Jens Kleesiek, Yonghui Wu ·

Traditionally, large language models have been either trained on general web crawls or domain-specific data. However, recent successes of generative large language models, have shed light on the benefits of cross-domain datasets. To examine the significance of prioritizing data diversity over quality, we present a German dataset comprising texts from five domains, along with another dataset aimed at containing high-quality data. Through training a series of models ranging between 122M and 750M parameters on both datasets, we conduct a comprehensive benchmark on multiple downstream tasks. Our findings demonstrate that the models trained on the cross-domain dataset outperform those trained on quality data alone, leading to improvements up to $4.45\%$ over the previous state-of-the-art. The models are available at https://huggingface.co/ikim-uk-essen

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