Papers by Rafet Sifa
Judging Quality Across Languages: A Multilingual Approach to Pretraining Data Filtering with Language Models (2025.emnlp-main)
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Mehdi Ali, Manuel Brack, Max Lübbering, Elias Wendt, Abbas Goher Khan, Richard Rutmann, Alex Jude, Maurice Kraus, Alexander Arno Weber, Felix Stollenwerk, David Kaczér, Florian Mai, Lucie Flek, Rafet Sifa, Nicolas Flores-Herr, Joachim Koehler, Patrick Schramowski, Michael Fromm, Kristian Kersting
| Challenge: | Existing open-source multilingual datasets rely on heuristic filtering methods restricting both their cross-lingual transferability and scalability. |
| Approach: | They propose a systematic approach that curates diverse and high-quality multilingual data at scale while significantly reducing computational demands. |
| Outcome: | Evaluated empirically across 35 languages, the proposed approach outperforms current heuristic filtering methods like Fineweb2 and improves model training quality and retention rates. |
Resource-Efficient Anonymization of Textual Data via Knowledge Distillation from Large Language Models (2025.coling-industry)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to anonymize textual data from large language models pose privacy risks due to their API-based access. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to distill large language models into smaller encoder-only models via named entity recognition coupled with regular expressions to create a lightweight model capable of effective anonymization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach reduces computational overhead while maintaining semantic integrity of data. |
Tokenizer Choice For LLM Training: Negligible or Crucial? (2024.findings-naacl)
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Mehdi Ali, Michael Fromm, Klaudia Thellmann, Richard Rutmann, Max Lübbering, Johannes Leveling, Katrin Klug, Jan Ebert, Niclas Doll, Jasper Buschhoff, Charvi Jain, Alexander Weber, Lena Jurkschat, Hammam Abdelwahab, Chelsea John, Pedro Ortiz Suarez, Malte Ostendorff, Samuel Weinbach, Rafet Sifa, Stefan Kesselheim, Nicolas Flores-Herr
| Challenge: | Recent success of large language models has been driven by curating the training dataset composition, scaling of model architectures and advancements in pretraining objectives, leaving tokenizer influence as a blind spot. |
| Approach: | They conduct a comprehensive study on the influence of tokenizer choice on LLM downstream performance by training 24 mono- and multilingual LLMs at a 2.6B parameter scale. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can significantly impact the model's downstream performance and training costs. |