Hugo Laurenccon, Lucile Saulnier, Thomas Wang, Christopher Akiki, Albert Villanova del Moral, Teven Le Scao, Leandro von Werra, Chenghao Mou, E. G. Ponferrada, Huu Nguyen, Jorg Frohberg, Mario vSavsko, Quentin Lhoest, Angelina McMillan-Major, Gérard Dupont, Stella Biderman, Anna Rogers, Loubna Ben Allal, F. Toni, Giada Pistilli, Olivier Nguyen, Somaieh Nikpoor, Maraim Masoud, Pierre Colombo, Javier de la Rosa, Paulo Villegas, Tristan Thrush, S. Longpre, Sebastian Nagel, Leon Weber, M. Muñoz, Jian Zhu, Daniel Alexander van Strien, Zaid Alyafeai, Khalid Almubarak, Minh Chien Vu, Itziar Gonzalez-Dios, Aitor Soroa Etxabe, Kyle Lo, Manan Dey, Pedro Ortiz Suarez, Aaron Gokaslan, Shamik Bose, David Ifeoluwa Adelani, Long Phan, H. Tran, I. Yu, S. Pai, Jenny Chim, Violette Lepercq, Suzana Ilic, Margaret Mitchell, Sasha Luccioni, Yacine Jernite

NeurIPS

Paper

Abstract

As language models grow ever larger, the need for large-scale high-quality text datasets has never been more pressing, especially in multilingual settings. The BigScience workshop, a 1-year international and multidisciplinary initiative, was formed with the goal of researching and training large language models as a values-driven undertaking, putting issues of ethics, harm, and governance in the foreground. This paper documents the data creation and curation efforts undertaken by BigScience to assemble the Responsible Open-science Open-collaboration Text Sources (ROOTS) corpus, a 1.6TB dataset spanning 59 languages that was used to train the 176-billion-parameter BigScience Large Open-science Open-access Multilingual (BLOOM) language model. We further release a large initial subset of the corpus and analyses thereof, and hope to empower large-scale monolingual and multilingual modeling projects with both the data and the processing tools, as well as stimulate research around this large multilingual corpus.