@inproceedings{salhan-etal-2024-less,
    title = "Less is More: Pre-Training Cross-Lingual Small-Scale Language Models with Cognitively-Plausible Curriculum Learning Strategies",
    author = "Salhan, Suchir  and
      Diehl Martinez, Richard  and
      Goriely, Z{\'e}bulon  and
      Buttery, Paula",
    editor = "Hu, Michael Y.  and
      Mueller, Aaron  and
      Ross, Candace  and
      Williams, Adina  and
      Linzen, Tal  and
      Zhuang, Chengxu  and
      Choshen, Leshem  and
      Cotterell, Ryan  and
      Warstadt, Alex  and
      Wilcox, Ethan Gotlieb",
    booktitle = "The 2nd BabyLM Challenge at the 28th Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning",
    month = nov,
    year = "2024",
    address = "Miami, FL, USA",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-sig-urls/2024.conll-babylm.15/",
    pages = "174--188",
    abstract = "Curriculum Learning has been a popular strategy to improve the cognitive plausibility of Small-Scale Language Models (SSLMs) in the BabyLM Challenge. However, it has not led to considerable improvements over non-curriculum models. We assess whether theoretical linguistic acquisition theories can be used to specify more fine-grained curriculum learning strategies, creating age-ordered corpora of Child-Directed Speech for four typologically distant language families to implement SSLMs and acquisition-inspired curricula cross-lingually. Comparing the success of three objective curricula (Growing, Inwards {\&} MMM) that precisely replicate the predictions of acquisition theories on a standard SSLM architecture, we find fine-grained acquisition-inspired curricula can outperform non-curriculum baselines and performance benefits of curricula strategies in SSLMs can be derived by specifying fine-grained language-specific curricula that precisely replicate language acquisition theories."
}