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