13 papers
LangMAP: A Language-Adaptive Approach to Tokenization
Clara Meister, Suchir Salhan, Andrzej Szablewski +3
Language-specific tokenizers improve tokenization quality and the downstream performance of models on those languages. However, using such a tokenizer comes at a cost: either a new…
A Computational Operationalisation of Competing Maturational Theories of Syntactic Development via Statistical Grammar Induction
Mila Marcheva, Suchir Salhan, Weiwei Sun
This paper is concerned with what intermediate syntactic categories children acquire during first language development, and in what order. Maturational theories make different pred…
Modelling the Diachronic Emergence of Phoneme Frequency Distributions
FermÃn Moscoso del Prado MartÃn, Suchir Salhan
Phoneme frequency distributions exhibit robust statistical regularities across languages, including exponential-tailed rank-frequency patterns and a negative relationship between p…
The Distribution of Phoneme Frequencies across the World's Languages: Macroscopic and Microscopic Information-Theoretic Models
FermÃn Moscoso del Prado MartÃn, Suchir Salhan
We demonstrate that the frequency distribution of phonemes across languages can be explained at both macroscopic and microscopic levels. Macroscopically, phoneme rank-frequency dis…
BabyLM Turns 4 and Goes Multilingual: Call for Papers for the 2026 BabyLM Workshop
Leshem Choshen, Ryan Cotterell, Mustafa Omer Gul +7
The goal of the BabyLM is to stimulate new research connections between cognitive modeling and language model pretraining. We invite contributions in this vein to the BabyLM Worksh…
Teacher Demonstrations in a BabyLM's Zone of Proximal Development for Contingent Multi-Turn Interaction
Suchir Salhan, Hongyi Gu, Donya Rooein +5
Multi-turn dialogues between a child and a caregiver are characterized by a property called contingency - that is, prompt, direct, and meaningful exchanges between interlocutors. W…