Supporting documents in ELI5
Author: saverymax
State: closed

I was attempting to use the ELI5 dataset, when I realized that huggingface does not provide the supporting documents (the source documents from the common crawl). Without the supporting documents, this makes the dataset about as useful for my project as a block of cheese, or some other more apt metaphor.  According to facebook, the entire document collection is quite large. However, it would still be helpful to at least include a subset of the supporting documents i.e., having some data is better than having a block of cheese, in my case at least.

If you choose not to include them, it would be helpful to have documentation mentioning this specifically. It is especially confusing because the hf nlp ELI5 dataset has the key `'document'` but there are no documents to be found :(

Comments: Hi @saverymax ! For licensing reasons, the original team was unable to release pre-processed CommonCrawl documents. Instead, they provided a script to re-create them from a CommonCrawl dump, but it unfortunately requires access to a medium-large size cluster:
https://github.com/facebookresearch/ELI5#downloading-support-documents-from-the-commoncrawl

In order to make the task accessible to people who may not have access to this kind of infrastructure, we suggest to use Wikipedia as a knowledge source rather than the full CommonCrawl. The following blog post shows how you can create Wikipedia support documents and get a performance that is on par with a system that uses CommonCrawl pages.
https://yjernite.github.io/lfqa.html#task_description

Hope that helps, using ElasticSearch to index Wiki40b and create the documents should take about 4 hours. Let us know if you have any trouble with the blog post though!

Hi, thanks for the quick response. The blog post is quite an interesting working example, thanks for sharing it.
Two follow-up points/questions about my original question:

1. Yes, I read that the facebook team could not share the CommonCrawl b/c of licensing reasons. They state "No, we are not allowed to host processed Reddit or CommonCrawl data," which indicates they could also not share the Reddit data for licensing reasons. But it seems that HuggingFace is able to share the Reddit data, so why not a subset of CommonCrawl?

2. Thanks for the suggestion about ElasticSearch and Wiki40b. This is good to know about performance. I definitely could do the indexing and querying myself. What I like about the ELI5 dataset though, at least what is suggested by the paper, is that to create the dataset they had already selected the top 100 web sources and made a single support document from those. Though it doesn't appear to be too sophisticated an approach, having a single support document pre-computed (without having to run the facebook code or a replacement with another dataset) is super useful for my work, especially since I'm not working on developing the latest and greatest retrieval model. Of course, I don't expect HF NLP datasets to be perfectly tailored to my use-case. I know there is overhead to any project, I'm just illustrating a use-case of ELI5 which is not possible with the data provided as-is. If it's for licensing reasons, that is perfectly acceptable a reason, and I appreciate your response.