What Makes a High-Quality Training Dataset for Large Language Models: A Practitioners' Perspective

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance in various application domains, largely due to their self-supervised pre-training on extensive high-quality text datasets. However, despite the importance of constructing such datasets, many leading LLMs lack documentation of their dataset construction and training procedures, leaving LLM practitioners with a limited understanding of what makes a high-quality training dataset for LLMs. To fill this gap, we initially identified 18 characteristics of high-quality LLM training datasets, as well as 10 potential data pre-processing methods and 6 data quality assessment methods, through detailed interviews with 13 experienced LLM professionals. We then surveyed 219 LLM practitioners from 23 countries across 5 continents. We asked our survey respondents to rate the importance of these characteristics, provide a rationale for their ratings, specify the key data pre-processing and data quality assessment methods they used, and highlight the challenges encountered during these processes. From our analysis, we identified 13 crucial characteristics of high-quality LLM datasets that receive a high rating, accompanied by key rationale provided by respondents. We also identified some widely-used data pre-processing and data quality assessment methods, along with 7 challenges encountered during these processes. Based on our findings, we discuss the implications for researchers and practitioners aiming to construct high-quality training datasets for optimizing LLMs.