Efficient Domain-adaptive Continual Pretraining for the Process Industry in the German Language

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Zhukova, Anastasia, Matt, Christian E., Gipp, Bela
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Zhukova, Anastasia
Matt, Christian E.
Gipp, Bela
author_facet Zhukova, Anastasia
Matt, Christian E.
Gipp, Bela
contents Domain-adaptive continual pretraining (DAPT) is a state-of-the-art technique that further trains a language model (LM) on its pretraining task, e.g., masked language modeling (MLM), when common domain adaptation via LM fine-tuning is not possible due to a lack of labeled task data. Although popular, MLM requires a significant corpus of domain-related data, which is difficult to obtain for specific domains in languages other than English, such as the process industry in the German language. This paper introduces an efficient approach called ICL-augmented pretraining or ICL-APT that leverages in-context learning (ICL) and k-nearest neighbors (kNN) to augment target data with domain-related and in-domain texts, significantly reducing GPU time while maintaining strong model performance. Our results show that the best configuration of ICL-APT performed better than the state-of-the-art DAPT by 28.7% (7.87 points) and requires almost 4 times less GPU-computing time, providing a cost-effective solution for industries with limited computational capacity. The findings highlight the broader applicability of this framework to other low-resource industries, making NLP-based solutions more accessible and feasible in production environments.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2504_19856
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Efficient Domain-adaptive Continual Pretraining for the Process Industry in the German Language
Zhukova, Anastasia
Matt, Christian E.
Gipp, Bela
Computation and Language
Domain-adaptive continual pretraining (DAPT) is a state-of-the-art technique that further trains a language model (LM) on its pretraining task, e.g., masked language modeling (MLM), when common domain adaptation via LM fine-tuning is not possible due to a lack of labeled task data. Although popular, MLM requires a significant corpus of domain-related data, which is difficult to obtain for specific domains in languages other than English, such as the process industry in the German language. This paper introduces an efficient approach called ICL-augmented pretraining or ICL-APT that leverages in-context learning (ICL) and k-nearest neighbors (kNN) to augment target data with domain-related and in-domain texts, significantly reducing GPU time while maintaining strong model performance. Our results show that the best configuration of ICL-APT performed better than the state-of-the-art DAPT by 28.7% (7.87 points) and requires almost 4 times less GPU-computing time, providing a cost-effective solution for industries with limited computational capacity. The findings highlight the broader applicability of this framework to other low-resource industries, making NLP-based solutions more accessible and feasible in production environments.
title Efficient Domain-adaptive Continual Pretraining for the Process Industry in the German Language
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.19856