Related papers: ToddlerBERTa: Exploiting BabyBERTa for Grammar Lea…

Children can acquire language from less than 100 million words of input. Large language models are far less data-efficient: they typically require 3 or 4 orders of magnitude more data and still do not perform as well as humans on many…

Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable performance on a variety of natural language understanding (NLU) tasks, primarily due to their in-context learning ability. This ability could be applied to building babylike models, i.e.…

Pre-trained Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown success in a diverse set of language inference and understanding tasks. The pre-training stage of LLMs looks at a large corpus of raw textual data. The BabyLM shared task compares LLM…

Language model pretraining has led to significant performance gains but careful comparison between different approaches is challenging. Training is computationally expensive, often done on private datasets of different sizes, and, as we…

While high-performing language models are typically trained on hundreds of billions of words, human children become fluent language users with a much smaller amount of data. What are the features of the data they receive, and how do these…

Modern language models like GPT-3, BERT, and LLaMA require massive training data, yet with sufficient training they reliably learn to distinguish grammatical from ungrammatical sentences. Children aged as young as 14 months already have the…

Research on developmentally plausible language models has largely focused on English, leaving open questions about multilingual settings. We present a systematic study of compact language models by extending BabyBERTa to English-French…

In this work, we explain our approach employed in the BabyLM Challenge, which uses various methods of training language models (LMs) with significantly less data compared to traditional large language models (LLMs) and are inspired by how…

A prominent achievement of natural language processing (NLP) is its ability to understand and generate meaningful human language. This capability relies on complex feedforward transformer block architectures pre-trained on large language…

This paper details the work of the University of Groningen for the BabyLM Challenge. We follow the idea that, like babies, language models should be introduced to simpler concepts first and build off of that knowledge to understand more…

Pre-trained language models have been dominating the field of natural language processing in recent years, and have led to significant performance gains for various complex natural language tasks. One of the most prominent pre-trained…

The BabyLM challenge called on participants to develop sample-efficient language models. Submissions were pretrained on a fixed English corpus, limited to the amount of words children are exposed to in development (<100m). The challenge…

This paper presents BAMBI (BAby language Models Boostrapped for Italian), a series of Baby Language Models (BabyLMs) trained on data that mimic the linguistic input received by a five-year-old Italian-speaking child. The BAMBI models are…

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 plausible pretraining data aiming to cover the equivalent of…

Recent advances in natural language processing (NLP) have been driven bypretrained language models like BERT, RoBERTa, T5, and GPT. Thesemodels excel at understanding complex texts, but biomedical literature, withits domain-specific…

Recent work investigates whether LMs learn human-like linguistic generalizations and representations from developmentally plausible amounts of data. Yet, the basic linguistic units processed in these LMs are determined by subword-based…

Large transformer-based language models, e.g. BERT and GPT-3, outperform previous architectures on most natural language processing tasks. Such language models are first pre-trained on gigantic corpora of text and later used as base-model…

NLP is currently dominated by general-purpose pretrained language models like RoBERTa, which achieve strong performance on NLU tasks through pretraining on billions of words. But what exact knowledge or skills do Transformer LMs learn from…

Recent success of pre-trained language models (LMs) has spurred widespread interest in the language capabilities that they possess. However, efforts to understand whether LM representations are useful for symbolic reasoning tasks have been…

Transformer language models (TLMs) are critical for most NLP tasks, but they are difficult to create for low-resource languages because of how much pretraining data they require. In this work, we investigate two techniques for training…