Related papers: BabyLMs for isiXhosa: Data-Efficient Language Mode…

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…

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…

The BabyLM Challenge is a community effort to close the data-efficiency gap between human and computational language learners. Participants compete to optimize language model training on a fixed language data budget of 100 million words or…

We present the call for papers for the BabyLM Challenge: Sample-efficient pretraining on a developmentally plausible corpus. This shared task is intended for participants with an interest in small scale language modeling, human language…

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.…

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved impressive results in a wide range of natural language applications. However, they often struggle to recognize low-resource languages, in particular African languages, which are not well…

Stemming from the limited availability of datasets and textual resources for low-resource languages such as isiZulu, there is a significant need to be able to harness knowledge from pre-trained models to improve low resource machine…

Multilingual transformer models like mBERT and XLM-RoBERTa have obtained great improvements for many NLP tasks on a variety of languages. However, recent works also showed that results from high-resource languages could not be easily…

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated potential in handling spoken inputs for high-resource languages, reaching state-of-the-art performance in various tasks. However, their applicability is still less explored in low-resource…

Multilingual pre-trained language models(mPLMs) offer significant benefits for many low-resource languages. To further expand the range of languages these models can support, many works focus on continued pre-training of these models.…

We present ToddlerBERTa, a BabyBERTa-like language model, exploring its capabilities through five different models with varied hyperparameters. Evaluating on BLiMP, SuperGLUE, MSGS, and a Supplement benchmark from the BabyLM challenge, we…

We present Lil-Bevo, our submission to the BabyLM Challenge. We pretrained our masked language models with three ingredients: an initial pretraining with music data, training on shorter sequences before training on longer ones, and masking…

Recent studies show that large language models (LLMs) are powerful tools for working with natural language, bringing advances in many areas of computational linguistics. However, these models face challenges when applied to low-resource…

Pre-trained language models (LMs) have, over the last few years, grown substantially in both societal adoption and training costs. This rapid growth in size has constrained progress in understanding and mitigating their biases. Since…

We describe our team's contribution to the STRICT-SMALL track of the BabyLM Challenge. The challenge requires training a language model from scratch using only a relatively small training dataset of ten million words. We experiment with…

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…

Each new generation of English-oriented Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibits enhanced cross-lingual transfer capabilities and significantly outperforms older LLMs on low-resource languages. This prompts the question: Is there a need for…

The increase in technological adoption worldwide comes with demands for novel tools to be used by the general population. Large Language Models (LLMs) provide a great opportunity in this respect, but their capabilities remain limited for…

This paper describes a linguistically-motivated approach to the 2024 edition of the BabyLM Challenge (Warstadt et al. 2023). Rather than pursuing a first language learning (L1) paradigm, we approach the challenge from a second language (L2)…

Researchers working on low-resource languages face persistent challenges due to limited data availability and restricted access to computational resources. Although most large language models (LLMs) are predominantly trained in…