[Question] Best way to batch a large dataset?
Sorry, I think I badly expressed myself, my bad. What I suggested is to compare with the usual loading textual data in pure TF with `TextLineDataset` with `nlp`. I know it is not recommended with very large datasets to use it, but I was curious to see how it behaves compared to a processing with `nlp` on smaller datasets.

BTW your script looks very interesting, thanks for sharing!!
I'm training on large datasets such as Wikipedia and BookCorpus. Following the instructions in [the tutorial notebook](https://colab.research.google.com/github/huggingface/nlp/blob/master/notebooks/Overview.ipynb), I see the following recommended for TensorFlow:

```python
train_tf_dataset = train_tf_dataset.filter(remove_none_values, load_from_cache_file=False)
columns = ['input_ids', 'token_type_ids', 'attention_mask', 'start_positions', 'end_positions']
train_tf_dataset.set_format(type='tensorflow', columns=columns)
features = {x: train_tf_dataset[x].to_tensor(default_value=0, shape=[None, tokenizer.max_len]) for x in columns[:3]} 
labels = {"output_1": train_tf_dataset["start_positions"].to_tensor(default_value=0, shape=[None, 1])}
labels["output_2"] = train_tf_dataset["end_positions"].to_tensor(default_value=0, shape=[None, 1])
### Question about this last line ###
tfdataset = tf.data.Dataset.from_tensor_slices((features, labels)).batch(8)
```

This code works for something like WikiText-2. However, scaling up to WikiText-103, the last line takes 5-10 minutes to run. I assume it is because tf.data.Dataset.from_tensor_slices() is pulling everything into memory, not lazily loading. This approach won't scale up to datasets 25x larger such as Wikipedia.

So I tried manual batching using `dataset.select()`:

```python
idxs = np.random.randint(len(dataset), size=bsz)
batch = dataset.select(idxs).map(lambda example: {"input_ids": tokenizer(example["text"])})
tf_batch = tf.constant(batch["ids"], dtype=tf.int64)
```

This appears to create a new Apache Arrow dataset with every batch I grab, and then tries to cache it. The runtime of `dataset.select([0, 1])` appears to be much worse than `dataset[:2]`. So using `select()` doesn't seem to be performant enough for a training loop.

Is there a performant scalable way to lazily load batches of nlp Datasets?
[Question] Best way to batch a large dataset? 
 I'm training on large datasets such as Wikipedia and BookCorpus. Following the instructions in [the tutorial notebook](https://colab.research.google.com/github/huggingface/nlp/blob/master/notebooks/Overview.ipynb), I see the following recommended for TensorFlow:

```python
train_tf_dataset = train_tf_dataset.filter(remove_none_values, load_from_cache_file=False)
columns = ['input_ids', 'token_type_ids', 'attention_mask', 'start_positions', 'end_positions']
train_tf_dataset.set_format(type='tensorflow', columns=columns)
features = {x: train_tf_dataset[x].to_tensor(default_value=0, shape=[None, tokenizer.max_len]) for x in columns[:3]} 
labels = {"output_1": train_tf_dataset["start_positions"].to_tensor(default_value=0, shape=[None, 1])}
labels["output_2"] = train_tf_dataset["end_positions"].to_tensor(default_value=0, shape=[None, 1])
### Question about this last line ###
tfdataset = tf.data.Dataset.from_tensor_slices((features, labels)).batch(8)
```

This code works for something like WikiText-2. However, scaling up to WikiText-103, the last line takes 5-10 minutes to run. I assume it is because tf.data.Dataset.from_tensor_slices() is pulling everything into memory, not lazily loading. This approach won't scale up to datasets 25x larger such as Wikipedia.

So I tried manual batching using `dataset.select()`:

```python
idxs = np.random.randint(len(dataset), size=bsz)
batch = dataset.select(idxs).map(lambda example: {"input_ids": tokenizer(example["text"])})
tf_batch = tf.constant(batch["ids"], dtype=tf.int64)
```

This appears to create a new Apache Arrow dataset with every batch I grab, and then tries to cache it. The runtime of `dataset.select([0, 1])` appears to be much worse than `dataset[:2]`. So using `select()` doesn't seem to be performant enough for a training loop.

Is there a performant scalable way to lazily load batches of nlp Datasets? 
 Sorry, I think I badly expressed myself, my bad. What I suggested is to compare with the usual loading textual data in pure TF with `TextLineDataset` with `nlp`. I know it is not recommended with very large datasets to use it, but I was curious to see how it behaves compared to a processing with `nlp` on smaller datasets.

BTW your script looks very interesting, thanks for sharing!!