Licensed Pile

Repo to hold code and track issues for the collection of permissively licensed data

Installation

The majority of packages required for data creation can be installed with pip install -r requirements.txt. You all need to run pip install -e . to get access to the licensed_pile shared utility library.

If you are on a system that don't support automatic installation of pandoc with pypandoc_binary, change it to pypandoc in the requirements.txt and and install pandoc manually.

Tips

You can look at Dolma formatted data via commandline tools like so.

cat ${file}.jsonl.gz | gunzip | jq -s ${commmand}

js -s is used to process the input as jsonl (valid json per line) instead of expecting the whole input to be valid json.

Then you can use jq syntax to look for specific things, e.g.:

Look at the text for item 1115 cat ${file}.jsonl.gz | gunzip | jq -s '.[1115].text'

Look at the text for item with the id of 12 (note that position in file is not correlated with id) cat ${file}.jsonl.gz | gunzip | jq -s '.[] | select(.id == "12").text'

Note: You can also use gunzip -c ${file}.jsonl.gz | jq -s ${command} which is slightly faster (reduces the amount of data flowwing through pipes) but if you forget the -c flag you end up uncompressing the file and deleting the compressed version, i.e. you need to run gzip ${file}.jsonl to fix it.

Capped-parallelism in bash script

Sometimes we want to download/process multiple files in parallel up to a limited number of jobs in bash script. Below is a example code snippet (used in courtlistener/get_data.sh). Note that jobs -r counts all jobs running in the current shell.

max_jobs = 8
for file in "${files[@]}"; do
    download_and_process "file" &

    # Limit the number of parallel jobs
    if (( $(jobs -r | wc -l) >= max_jobs )); then
        wait -n
    fi
done

Development

We use git pre-commit hooks to format code and keep style consistent.

• Install the pre-commit library with pip install pre-commit.
• Install the pre-commit hooks with pre-commit install from the repository root.

Now when a git commit is run, the hooks will run. If one of the hooks reformats a file, the commit will be blocked. Then you need to inspect the changes and readd them with git add. Then you can re-run your commit command and the commit will actually be added.