# Datasets: A Community Library for Natural Language Processing

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.02846 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.02846/

## Key facts

- Cited by 530 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 24 of its 37 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Sep 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 24 of 24)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11401/) (2020)
- [GLUE: A Multi-Task Benchmark and Analysis Platform for Natural Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.07461/) (2018)
- [SQuAD: 100,000+ Questions for Machine Comprehension of Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.05250/) (2016)
- [Billion-scale similarity search with GPUs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.08734/) (2017)
- [Deep contextualized word representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.05365/) (2018)
- [Datasheets for Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.09010/) (2018)
- [Annotation Artifacts in Natural Language Inference Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.02324/) (2018)
- [ELI5: Long Form Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.09190/) (2019)
- [Six Challenges for Neural Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03872/) (2017)
- [Synthetic and Natural Noise Both Break Neural Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.02173/) (2017)
- [Hypothesis Only Baselines in Natural Language Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.01042/) (2018)
- [Quality at a Glance: An Audit of Web-Crawled Multilingual Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.12028/) (2021)
- [The GEM Benchmark: Natural Language Generation, its Evaluation and Metrics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.01672/) (2021)
- [The Natural Language Decathlon: Multitask Learning as Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.08730/) (2018)
- [CLIMATE-FEVER: A Dataset for Verification of Real-World Climate Claims](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.00614/) (2020)
- [Social Biases in NLP Models as Barriers for Persons with Disabilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00813/) (2020)
- [Hurdles to Progress in Long-form Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.06332/) (2021)
- [Towards Accountability for Machine Learning Datasets: Practices from Software Engineering and Infrastructure](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.13561/) (2020)
- [Robustness Gym: Unifying the NLP Evaluation Landscape](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.04840/) (2021)
- [Distributed Deep Learning in Open Collaborations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.10207/) (2021)
- [Reusable Templates and Guides For Documenting Datasets and Models for Natural Language Processing and Generation: A Case Study of the HuggingFace and GEM Data and Model Cards](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07374/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 530)

- [BLOOM: A 176B-Parameter Open-Access Multilingual Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.05100/) (2022)
- [LlamaFactory: Unified Efficient Fine-Tuning of 100+ Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.13372/) (2024)
- [Rethinking the Role of Demonstrations: What Makes In-Context Learning Work?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.12837/) (2022)
- [Editing Models with Task Arithmetic](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04089/) (2022)
- [MTEB: Massive Text Embedding Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.07316/) (2022)
- [NV-Embed: Improved Techniques for Training LLMs as Generalist Embedding Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.17428/) (2024)
- [Larger language models do in-context learning differently](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.03846/) (2023)
- [ProcTHOR: Large-Scale Embodied AI Using Procedural Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.06994/) (2022)
- [A critical look at the evaluation of GNNs under heterophily: Are we really making progress?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.11640/) (2023)
- [LexGLUE: A Benchmark Dataset for Legal Language Understanding in English](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.00976/) (2021)
- [PromptSource: An Integrated Development Environment and Repository for Natural Language Prompts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.01279/) (2022)
- [UnifiedSKG: Unifying and Multi-Tasking Structured Knowledge Grounding with Text-to-Text Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.05966/) (2022)
- [RA-DIT: Retrieval-Augmented Dual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.01352/) (2023)
- [Relative representations enable zero-shot latent space communication](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.15430/) (2022)
- [Simple synthetic data reduces sycophancy in large language models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.03958/) (2023)
- [Delta Tuning: A Comprehensive Study of Parameter Efficient Methods for Pre-trained Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.06904/) (2022)
- [Lessons from the Trenches on Reproducible Evaluation of Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14782/) (2024)
- [SCROLLS: Standardized CompaRison Over Long Language Sequences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03533/) (2022)
- [Backdooring Instruction-Tuned Large Language Models with Virtual Prompt Injection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.16888/) (2023)
- [Repairing the Cracked Foundation: A Survey of Obstacles in Evaluation Practices for Generated Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.06935/) (2022)
- [Quantizable Transformers: Removing Outliers by Helping Attention Heads Do Nothing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.12929/) (2023)
- [The BigScience ROOTS Corpus: A 1.6TB Composite Multilingual Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.03915/) (2023)
- [Stop Uploading Test Data in Plain Text: Practical Strategies for Mitigating Data Contamination by Evaluation Benchmarks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10160/) (2023)
- [SaulLM-7B: A pioneering Large Language Model for Law](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03883/) (2024)
- [LLM Post-Training: A Deep Dive into Reasoning Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.21321/) (2025)
- [Reframing Human-AI Collaboration for Generating Free-Text Explanations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.08674/) (2021)
- [Accelerating Transformer Inference for Translation via Parallel Decoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10427/) (2023)
- [Sudden Drops in the Loss: Syntax Acquisition, Phase Transitions, and Simplicity Bias in MLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.07311/) (2023)
- [DataInf: Efficiently Estimating Data Influence in LoRA-tuned LLMs and Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.00902/) (2023)
- [Ground-Truth Labels Matter: A Deeper Look into Input-Label Demonstrations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.12685/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The scale, variety, and quantity of publicly-available NLP datasets has grown rapidly as researchers propose new tasks, larger models, and novel benchmarks. Datasets is a community library for contemporary NLP designed to support this ecosystem. Datasets aims to standardize end-user interfaces, versioning, and documentation, while providing a lightweight front-end that behaves similarly for small datasets as for internet-scale corpora. The design of the library incorporates a distributed, community-driven approach to adding datasets and documenting usage. After a year of development, the library now includes more than 650 unique datasets, has more than 250 contributors, and has helped support a variety of novel cross-dataset research projects and shared tasks. The library is available at https://github.com/huggingface/datasets.