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Main Authors: Karch, Tristan, Engel, Luca, Schwaller, Philippe, Kaplan, Frédéric
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.13691
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author Karch, Tristan
Engel, Luca
Schwaller, Philippe
Kaplan, Frédéric
author_facet Karch, Tristan
Engel, Luca
Schwaller, Philippe
Kaplan, Frédéric
contents As large language models (LLMs) converge towards similar capabilities, the key to advancing their performance lies in identifying and incorporating valuable new information sources. However, evaluating which text collections are worth the substantial investment required for digitization, preprocessing, and integration into LLM systems remains a significant challenge. We present a novel approach to this challenge: an automated pipeline that evaluates the potential information gain from text collections without requiring model training or fine-tuning. Our method generates multiple choice questions (MCQs) from texts and measures an LLM's performance both with and without access to the source material. The performance gap between these conditions serves as a proxy for the collection's information potential. We validate our approach using five strategically selected datasets: EPFL PhD manuscripts, a private collection of Venetian historical records, two sets of Wikipedia articles on related topics, and a synthetic baseline dataset. Our results demonstrate that this method effectively identifies collections containing valuable novel information, providing a practical tool for prioritizing data acquisition and integration efforts.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_13691
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Is This Collection Worth My LLM's Time? Automatically Measuring Information Potential in Text Corpora
Karch, Tristan
Engel, Luca
Schwaller, Philippe
Kaplan, Frédéric
Computation and Language
As large language models (LLMs) converge towards similar capabilities, the key to advancing their performance lies in identifying and incorporating valuable new information sources. However, evaluating which text collections are worth the substantial investment required for digitization, preprocessing, and integration into LLM systems remains a significant challenge. We present a novel approach to this challenge: an automated pipeline that evaluates the potential information gain from text collections without requiring model training or fine-tuning. Our method generates multiple choice questions (MCQs) from texts and measures an LLM's performance both with and without access to the source material. The performance gap between these conditions serves as a proxy for the collection's information potential. We validate our approach using five strategically selected datasets: EPFL PhD manuscripts, a private collection of Venetian historical records, two sets of Wikipedia articles on related topics, and a synthetic baseline dataset. Our results demonstrate that this method effectively identifies collections containing valuable novel information, providing a practical tool for prioritizing data acquisition and integration efforts.
title Is This Collection Worth My LLM's Time? Automatically Measuring Information Potential in Text Corpora
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.13691