Paper ID: 2310.07321

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

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

Submitted: Oct 11, 2023