ChineseWebText: Large-scale High-quality Chinese Web Text Extracted with Effective Evaluation Model

TL;DR

This paper introduces EvalWeb, a comprehensive tool-chain for extracting and evaluating high-quality Chinese web texts, resulting in the large-scale ChineseWebText dataset to improve LLM pre-training.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel complete tool-chain for extracting and assessing Chinese web data, including a quality evaluation model, and releases the largest high-quality Chinese web text dataset.

Findings

Releases 1.42 TB ChineseWebText dataset with quality scores

Provides a cleaner 600 GB subset with quality > 90%

Facilitates better data selection for Chinese LLM pre-training

Abstract

During the development of large language models (LLMs), the scale and quality of the pre-training data play a crucial role in shaping LLMs' capabilities. To accelerate the research of LLMs, several large-scale datasets, such as C4 [1], Pile [2], RefinedWeb [3] and WanJuan [4], have been released to the public. However, most of the released corpus focus mainly on English, and there is still lack of complete tool-chain for extracting clean texts from web data. Furthermore, fine-grained information of the corpus, e.g. the quality of each text, is missing. To address these challenges, we propose in this paper a new complete tool-chain EvalWeb to extract Chinese clean texts from noisy web data. First, similar to previous work, manually crafted rules are employed to discard explicit noisy texts from the raw crawled web contents. Second, a well-designed evaluation model is leveraged to assess the remaining relatively clean data, and each text is assigned a specific quality score. Finally, we can easily utilize an appropriate threshold to select the high-quality pre-training data for Chinese. Using our proposed approach, we release the largest and latest large-scale high-quality Chinese web text ChineseWebText, which consists of 1.42 TB and each text is associated with a quality score, facilitating the LLM researchers to choose the data according to the desired quality thresholds. We also release a much cleaner subset of 600 GB Chinese data with the quality exceeding 90%.