8 papers
Child-directed speech facilitates production, not comprehension, in BabyLMs
Bastian Bunzeck, Sina ZarrieÃ
Recent studies suggest that child-directed speech is not conducive to language learning in BabyLMs. However, current evaluations focus predominantly on comprehension and not produc…
The Frequency Confound in Language-Model Surprisal and Metaphor Novelty
Omar Momen, Sina ZarrieÃ
Language-model (LM) surprisal is widely used as a proxy for contextual predictability and has been reported to correlate with metaphor novelty judgments. However, surprisal is tigh…
How Hypocritical Is Your LLM judge? Listener-Speaker Asymmetries in the Pragmatic Competence of Large Language Models
Judith Sieker, Sina ZarrieÃ
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly studied as repositories of linguistic knowledge. In this line of work, models are commonly evaluated both as generators of language an…
Dialogue Is Not Enough to Make a Communicative BabyLM (But Neither Is Developmentally Inspired Reinforcement Learning)
Francesca Padovani, Bastian Bunzeck, Manar Ali +4
We investigate whether pre-training exclusively on dialogue data results in formally and functionally apt small language models. Based on this pre-trained llamalogue model, we empl…
Do Construction Distributions Shape Formal Language Learning In German BabyLMs?
Bastian Bunzeck, Daniel Duran, Sina ZarrieÃ
We analyze the influence of utterance-level construction distributions in German child-directed/child-available speech on the resulting word-level, syntactic and semantic competenc…
Subword models struggle with word learning, but surprisal hides it
Bastian Bunzeck, Sina ZarrieÃ
We study word learning in subword and character language models with the psycholinguistic lexical decision task. While subword LMs struggle to discern words and non-words with high…