For green AI, it is crucial to measure and reduce the carbon footprint emitted during the training of large language models. In NLP, performing pre-training on Transformer models requires significant computational resources. This pre-training involves using a large amount of text data to gain prior knowledge for performing downstream tasks. Thus, it is important that we select the correct data in the form of domain-specific data from this vast corpus to achieve optimum results aligned with our domain-specific tasks. While training on large unsupervised data is expensive, it can be optimized by performing a data selection step before pretraining. Selecting important data reduces the space overhead and the substantial amount of time required to pre-train the model while maintaining constant accuracy. We investigate the existing selection strategies and propose our own domain-adaptive data selection method - TextGram - that effectively selects essential data from large corpora. We compare and evaluate the results of finetuned models for text classification task with and without data selection. We show that the proposed strategy works better compared to other selection methods.

This type of cross-lingual transfer learning can make it easier to bootstrap a model in a language for which training data is scarce, by taking advantage of more abundant data in a source language. But sometimes the data in the source language is so abundant that using all of it to train a transfer model would be impractically time consuming. Moreover, linguistic differences between source and target languages mean that pruning the training data in the source language, so that its statistical patterns better match those of the target language, can actually improve the performance of the transferred model. In a paper we're presenting at this year's Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, we describe experiments with a new data selection technique that let us halve the amount of training data required in the source language, while actually improving a transfer model's performance in a target language. For evaluation purposes, we used two techniques to cut the source-language data set in half: one was our data selection technique, and the other was random sampling.

Cross-lingual learning is an AI technique involving training a natural language processing model in one language and retraining it in another. It's been demonstrated that retrained models can outperform those trained from scratch in the second language, which is likely why researchers at Amazon's Alexa division are investing considerable time investigating them. In a paper scheduled to be presented at this year's Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, two scientists at the Alexa AI natural understanding group -- Quynh Do and Judith Gaspers -- and colleagues propose a data selection technique that halves the amount of required training data. They claim that it surprisingly improves rather than compromises the model's overall performance in the target language. "Sometimes the data in the source language is so abundant that using all of it to train a transfer model would be impractically time consuming," wrote Do and Gaspers in a blog post.