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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 employ a variety of fine-tuning strategies to enforce "more…

Language models (LMs) have demonstrated remarkable proficiency in generating linguistically coherent text, sparking discussions about their relevance to understanding human language learnability. However, a significant gap exists between…

During language acquisition, children follow a typical sequence of learning stages, whereby they first learn to categorize phonemes before they develop their lexicon and eventually master increasingly complex syntactic structures. However,…

We investigate how neural language models acquire individual words during training, extracting learning curves and ages of acquisition for over 600 words on the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory (Fenson et al., 2007).…

Neural Language Models (NLMs) have made tremendous advances during the last years, achieving impressive performance on various linguistic tasks. Capitalizing on this, studies in neuroscience have started to use NLMs to study neural activity…

Speech directed to children differs from adult-directed speech in linguistic aspects such as repetition, word choice, and sentence length, as well as in aspects of the speech signal itself, such as prosodic and phonemic variation. Human…

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.…

In contrast to children, language models (LMs) exhibit considerably inferior data efficiency when acquiring language. In this submission to the BabyLM Challenge (Warstadt et al., 2023), we test the hypothesis that this data efficiency gap…

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…

Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit a puzzling disparity in their formal linguistic competence: while they learn some linguistic phenomena with near-perfect mastery, they often perform below chance on others, even after training on…

Most large language models are fine-tuned using either expensive human-annotated data or GPT-4 generated data which cannot guarantee performance in certain domains. We argue that although the web-crawled data often has formatting errors…

Language models have seen significant growth in the size of their corpus, leading to notable performance improvements. Yet, there has been limited progress in developing models that handle smaller, more human-like datasets. As part of the…

The quality of training data impacts the performance of pre-trained large language models (LMs). Given a fixed budget of tokens, we study how to best select data that leads to good downstream model performance across tasks. We develop a new…

Large language models are trained on massive scrapes of the web, as required by current scaling laws. Most progress is made for English, given its abundance of high-quality pretraining data. For most other languages, however, such high…

Large language models (LLMs) have been recently leveraged as training data generators for various natural language processing (NLP) tasks. While previous research has explored different approaches to training models using generated data,…

Speech language models (SpeechLMs) accept speech input and produce speech output, allowing for more natural human-computer interaction compared to text-based large language models (LLMs). Traditional approaches for developing SpeechLMs are…

Transformers-based pretrained language models achieve outstanding results in many well-known NLU benchmarks. However, while pretraining methods are very convenient, they are expensive in terms of time and resources. This calls for a study…

The success of ChatGPT has recently attracted numerous efforts to replicate it, with instruction-tuning strategies being a key factor in achieving remarkable results. Instruction-tuning not only significantly enhances the model's…

This paper explores the potential of leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) for data augmentation in multilingual commonsense reasoning datasets where the available training data is extremely limited. To achieve this, we utilise several…

Recent studies highlight the potential of large language models in creating educational tools for children, yet significant challenges remain in maintaining key child-specific properties such as linguistic nuances, cognitive needs, and…