5 papers
Is Child-Directed Language Optimized for Word Learning? A Computational Study of Verb Meaning Acquisition
Francesca Padovani, Jaap Jumelet, Yevgen Matusevych +1
Is child-directed language (CDL) optimized to support language learning, and which aspects of linguistic development does it facilitate? We investigate this question using neural l…
TurBLiMP: A Turkish Benchmark of Linguistic Minimal Pairs
Ezgi BaÅar, Francesca Padovani, Jaap Jumelet +1
We introduce TurBLiMP, the first Turkish benchmark of linguistic minimal pairs, designed to evaluate the linguistic abilities of monolingual and multilingual language models (LMs).…
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…
BabyBabelLM: A Multilingual Benchmark of Developmentally Plausible Training Data
Jaap Jumelet, Abdellah Fourtassi, Akari Haga +23
We present BabyBabelLM, a multilingual collection of datasets modeling the language a person observes from birth until they acquire a native language. We curate developmentally pla…
Child-Directed Language Does Not Consistently Boost Syntax Learning in Language Models
Francesca Padovani, Jaap Jumelet, Yevgen Matusevych +1
Seminal work by Huebner et al. (2021) showed that language models (LMs) trained on English Child-Directed Language (CDL) can reach similar syntactic abilities as LMs trained on muc…