Source Prompt: Coordinated Pre-training of Language Models on Diverse
  Corpora from Multiple Sources
Yipei Xu Dakuan Lu Jiaqing Liang Xintao Wang Yipeng Geng Yingsi Xin Hengkui Wu Ken Chen ruiji zhang Yanghua Xiao
Pre-trained language models (PLMs) have established the new paradigm in the
field of NLP. For more powerful PLMs, one of the most popular and successful
way is to continuously scale up sizes of the models and the pre-training
corpora. These large corpora are generally obtained by converging smaller ones
from multiple sources, they are thus growing increasingly diverse. However, the
side-effects of these colossal converged corpora remain understudied. In this
paper, we identify the disadvantage of heterogeneous corpora from multiple
sources for pre-training PLMs. Towards coordinated pre-training on diverse
corpora, we further propose source prompts (SP), which explicitly prompt the
model of the data source at the pre-training and fine-tuning stages. Results of
extensive experiments demonstrate that PLMs pre-trained with SP on diverse
corpora gain significant improvement in various downstream tasks.