The Dataset for Pretraining BERT

BERT Pretraining Data

The previous deck specified BERT’s model. This one specifies the data: how to turn raw text into the (masked tokens, NSP label, segment IDs, valid lengths) tuples that the pretraining loop expects.

We use WikiText-2 — a small, readable Wikipedia subset. Real BERT was pretrained on BookCorpus + English Wikipedia (~3.3B tokens); the recipe is identical, just scaled up.

Read WikiText-2

WikiText-2 keeps punctuation, case, and numbers. The loader returns paragraphs as sentence lists so NSP can sample adjacent or random sentence pairs:

from d2l import mxnet as d2l
from mxnet import gluon, np, npx
import os
import random

npx.set_np()
WIKITEXT_2_URL = ('https://huggingface.co/datasets/Salesforce/wikitext/'
                  'resolve/main/wikitext-2-v1/train-00000-of-00001.parquet')


def _read_wiki(data_dir=None):
    import contextlib
    import io
    import pandas as pd
    with contextlib.redirect_stdout(io.StringIO()):
        fname = d2l.download(WIKITEXT_2_URL, folder='../data')
    lines = pd.read_parquet(fname)['text'].tolist()
    # Uppercase letters are converted to lowercase ones
    paragraphs = [line.strip().lower().split(' . ')
                  for line in lines if len(line.split(' . ')) >= 2]
    random.shuffle(paragraphs)
    return paragraphs

Generating NSP examples

For each sentence, with probability 0.5 pair it with the next sentence (is_next=1); otherwise pair with a random sentence (is_next=0):

def _get_next_sentence(sentence, next_sentence, paragraphs):
    if random.random() < 0.5:
        is_next = True
    else:
        # `paragraphs` is a list of lists of lists
        next_sentence = random.choice(random.choice(paragraphs))
        is_next = False
    return sentence, next_sentence, is_next
def _get_nsp_data_from_paragraph(paragraph, paragraphs, vocab, max_len):
    nsp_data_from_paragraph = []
    for i in range(len(paragraph) - 1):
        tokens_a, tokens_b, is_next = _get_next_sentence(
            paragraph[i], paragraph[i + 1], paragraphs)
        # Consider 1 '<cls>' token and 2 '<sep>' tokens
        if len(tokens_a) + len(tokens_b) + 3 > max_len:
            continue
        tokens, segments = d2l.get_tokens_and_segments(tokens_a, tokens_b)
        nsp_data_from_paragraph.append((tokens, segments, is_next))
    return nsp_data_from_paragraph

Generating Masked LM labels

Pick 15% of token positions. For those:

  • 80%: replace with <mask>.
  • 10%: replace with a random token.
  • 10%: leave the original (so the model can’t tell which position was selected for prediction).
def _replace_mlm_tokens(tokens, candidate_pred_positions, num_mlm_preds,
                        vocab):
    # For the input of a masked language model, make a new copy of tokens and
    # replace some of them by '<mask>' or random tokens
    mlm_input_tokens = [token for token in tokens]
    pred_positions_and_labels = []
    # Shuffle for getting 15% random tokens for prediction in the masked
    # language modeling task
    random.shuffle(candidate_pred_positions)
    for mlm_pred_position in candidate_pred_positions:
        if len(pred_positions_and_labels) >= num_mlm_preds:
            break
        masked_token = None
        # 80% of the time: replace the word with the '<mask>' token
        if random.random() < 0.8:
            masked_token = '<mask>'
        else:
            # 10% of the time: keep the word unchanged
            if random.random() < 0.5:
                masked_token = tokens[mlm_pred_position]
            # 10% of the time: replace the word with a random word
            else:
                masked_token = random.choice(vocab.idx_to_token)
        mlm_input_tokens[mlm_pred_position] = masked_token
        pred_positions_and_labels.append(
            (mlm_pred_position, tokens[mlm_pred_position]))
    return mlm_input_tokens, pred_positions_and_labels
def _get_mlm_data_from_tokens(tokens, vocab):
    candidate_pred_positions = []
    # `tokens` is a list of strings
    for i, token in enumerate(tokens):
        # Special tokens are not predicted in the masked language modeling
        # task
        if token in ['<cls>', '<sep>']:
            continue
        candidate_pred_positions.append(i)
    # 15% of random tokens are predicted in the masked language modeling task
    num_mlm_preds = max(1, round(len(tokens) * 0.15))
    mlm_input_tokens, pred_positions_and_labels = _replace_mlm_tokens(
        tokens, candidate_pred_positions, num_mlm_preds, vocab)
    pred_positions_and_labels = sorted(pred_positions_and_labels,
                                       key=lambda x: x[0])
    pred_positions = [v[0] for v in pred_positions_and_labels]
    mlm_pred_labels = [v[1] for v in pred_positions_and_labels]
    return vocab[mlm_input_tokens], pred_positions, vocab[mlm_pred_labels]

Padding

Pad to the batch max length; track valid_lens for attention masking; pad MLM labels with zero so the loss ignores them:

def _pad_bert_inputs(examples, max_len, vocab):
    max_num_mlm_preds = round(max_len * 0.15)
    all_token_ids, all_segments, valid_lens,  = [], [], []
    all_pred_positions, all_mlm_weights, all_mlm_labels = [], [], []
    nsp_labels = []
    for (token_ids, pred_positions, mlm_pred_label_ids, segments,
         is_next) in examples:
        all_token_ids.append(np.array(token_ids + [vocab['<pad>']] * (
            max_len - len(token_ids)), dtype='int32'))
        all_segments.append(np.array(segments + [0] * (
            max_len - len(segments)), dtype='int32'))
        # `valid_lens` excludes count of '<pad>' tokens
        valid_lens.append(np.array(len(token_ids), dtype='float32'))
        all_pred_positions.append(np.array(pred_positions + [0] * (
            max_num_mlm_preds - len(pred_positions)), dtype='int32'))
        # Predictions of padded tokens will be filtered out in the loss via
        # multiplication of 0 weights
        all_mlm_weights.append(
            np.array([1.0] * len(mlm_pred_label_ids) + [0.0] * (
                max_num_mlm_preds - len(pred_positions)), dtype='float32'))
        all_mlm_labels.append(np.array(mlm_pred_label_ids + [0] * (
            max_num_mlm_preds - len(mlm_pred_label_ids)), dtype='int32'))
        nsp_labels.append(np.array(is_next))
    return (all_token_ids, all_segments, valid_lens, all_pred_positions,
            all_mlm_weights, all_mlm_labels, nsp_labels)

Custom Dataset class

Wraps the per-example generators into a __getitem__ interface — the standard PyTorch / framework idiom:

class _WikiTextDataset(gluon.data.Dataset):
    def __init__(self, paragraphs, max_len):
        # Input `paragraphs[i]` is a list of sentence strings representing a
        # paragraph; while output `paragraphs[i]` is a list of sentences
        # representing a paragraph, where each sentence is a list of tokens
        paragraphs = [d2l.tokenize(
            paragraph, token='word') for paragraph in paragraphs]
        sentences = [sentence for paragraph in paragraphs
                     for sentence in paragraph]
        self.vocab = d2l.Vocab(sentences, min_freq=5, reserved_tokens=[
            '<pad>', '<mask>', '<cls>', '<sep>'])
        # Get data for the next sentence prediction task
        examples = []
        for paragraph in paragraphs:
            examples.extend(_get_nsp_data_from_paragraph(
                paragraph, paragraphs, self.vocab, max_len))
        # Get data for the masked language model task
        examples = [(_get_mlm_data_from_tokens(tokens, self.vocab)
                      + (segments, is_next))
                     for tokens, segments, is_next in examples]
        # Pad inputs
        (self.all_token_ids, self.all_segments, self.valid_lens,
         self.all_pred_positions, self.all_mlm_weights,
         self.all_mlm_labels, self.nsp_labels) = _pad_bert_inputs(
            examples, max_len, self.vocab)

    def __getitem__(self, idx):
        return (self.all_token_ids[idx], self.all_segments[idx],
                self.valid_lens[idx], self.all_pred_positions[idx],
                self.all_mlm_weights[idx], self.all_mlm_labels[idx],
                self.nsp_labels[idx])

    def __len__(self):
        return len(self.all_token_ids)

Loader factory

Download corpus → tokenize → generate NSP + MLM pairs → DataLoader:

def load_data_wiki(batch_size, max_len):
    """Load the WikiText-2 dataset."""
    num_workers = d2l.get_dataloader_workers()
    paragraphs = _read_wiki()
    train_set = _WikiTextDataset(paragraphs, max_len)
    train_iter = gluon.data.DataLoader(train_set, batch_size, shuffle=True,
                                       num_workers=num_workers)
    return train_iter, train_set.vocab

Inspect a minibatch

Verify shapes: tokens, segments, valid_lens, pred_positions, mlm_weights, mlm_labels, nsp_labels. mlm_weights marks which padded prediction slots should contribute to the MLM loss:

batch_size, max_len = 512, 64
train_iter, vocab = load_data_wiki(batch_size, max_len)

for (tokens_X, segments_X, valid_lens_x, pred_positions_X, mlm_weights_X,
     mlm_Y, nsp_y) in train_iter:
    print(tokens_X.shape, segments_X.shape, valid_lens_x.shape,
          pred_positions_X.shape, mlm_weights_X.shape, mlm_Y.shape,
          nsp_y.shape)
    break
len(vocab)

Recap

  • A BERT minibatch carries seven tensors: tokens, segments, valid_lens, masked positions, MLM weights, MLM labels, NSP label.
  • 15% MLM masking with the 80/10/10 split is the original recipe; modern variants (RoBERTa) drop NSP, increase masking, and dynamic-mask each epoch.
  • Pretraining BERT for real takes 16+ TPU/GPU-days; the WikiText-2 demo is small enough to play with.