An open-source replication of the WebText dataset from OpenAI, that was used to train GPT-2.

This distribution was created by Aaron Gokaslan and Vanya Cohen of Brown University.

Initial Data Collection and Normalization The authors started by extracting all Reddit post urls from the Reddit submissions dataset. These links were deduplicated, filtered to exclude non-html content, and then shuffled randomly. The links were then distributed to several machines in parallel for download, and all web pages were extracted using the newspaper python package. Using Facebook FastText, non-English web pages were filtered out.

Subsequently, near-duplicate documents were identified using local-sensitivity hashing (LSH). Documents were hashed into sets of 5-grams and all documents that had a similarity threshold of greater than 0.5 were removed. The the remaining documents were tokenized, and documents with fewer than 128 tokens were removed. This left 38GB of text data (40GB using SI units) from 8,013,769 documents.