The NLP Seminar is organised by the Linguistic Engineering Group at the Institute of Computer Science, Polish Academy of Sciences (ICS PAS). It will restart in October and will take place on (some) Mondays, usually at 10:15 am, often online – please use the link next to the presentation title. All recorded talks are available on YouTube.

15 September 2025

Louis Esteve (Universite Paris-Saclay)

Diversity and dataset size – a quantitative perspective  

The field of Natural Language Processing (NLP) studies the abilities of computer systems to process and generate natural language, and has received increasing attention from the general population since the democratisation of generative and conversational models. However, behind the scenes, state-of-the-art NLP models are trained on ever-larger datasets, reaching trillions of tokens. It may be argued that the creation and use of such immense datasets is motivated by the idea that 'the larger the dataset, the more diverse it is', and that in turn 'if the training set is more diverse, it shall yield better models'. However, these statements thus far remain intuitions and need to be properly tested. To this end, this presentation will tackle methods and caveats of formal diversity quantification including limitations of the literature, a preliminary discussion on the link between diversity and dataset size, as well as their impact on downstream applications.

Please see also the talks given in 2000–2015 and 2015–2025.