We present an ongoing initiative to provide open, very large, high-quality, and richly annotated textual datasets for almost 200 languages. At 30 trillion tokens, this is likely the largest generally available multilingual collection of LLM pre-training data. These datasets are derived from web crawls from different sources and accompanied with a complete, open-source pipeline for document selection from web archives, text extraction from HTML, language identification for noisy texts, exact and near-deduplication, annotation with, among others, register labels, text quality estimates, and personally identifiable information; and final selection and filtering. We report on data quality probes through contrastive and analytical statistics, through manual inspection of samples for some 20 languages, and through end-to-end evaluation of various language model architectures trained on this data. For multilingual LLM evaluation, we provide a comprehensive collection of benchmarks for nine European languages, with special emphasis on natively created tasks, mechanisms to mitigate prompt sensitivity, and refined normalization and aggregation of scores. Additionally, we train and evaluate a family of 57 monolingual encoder–decoder models, as well as about 30 “smallish” monolingual GPT-like reference models. Besides the monolingual data and models, we also present a very large collection of parallel texts automatically mined from this data, together with a novel parallel corpus synthesized via machine translation.

We describe the High Performance Language Technologies project (HPLT), a 3-year EU-funded project started in September 2022. HPLT will build a space combining petabytes of natural language data with large-scale model training. It will derive monolingual and bilingual datasets from the Internet Archive and CommonCrawl and build efficient and solid machine translation (MT) as well as large language models (LLMs). HPLT aims at providing free, sustainable and reusable datasets, models and workflows at scale using high-performance computing (HPC).

We introduce the project “MaCoCu: Massive collection and curation of monolingual and bilingual data: focus on under-resourced languages”, funded by the Connecting Europe Facility, which is aimed at building monolingual and parallel corpora for under-resourced European languages. The approach followed consists of crawling large amounts of textual data from carefully selected top-level domains of the Internet, and then applying a curation and enrichment pipeline. In addition to corpora, the project will release successive versions of the free/open-source web crawling and curation software used.

Marta Bañón, Pinzhen Chen, Barry Haddow, Kenneth Heafield, Hieu Hoang, Miquel Esplà-Gomis, Mikel L. Forcada, Amir Kamran, Faheem Kirefu, Philipp Koehn, Sergio Ortiz Rojas, Leopoldo Pla Sempere, Gema Ramírez-Sánchez, Elsa Sarrías, Marek Strelec, Brian Thompson, William Waites, Dion Wiggins, Jaume Zaragoza. Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics. 2020.