For years since the GPT-2 paper, emergent in-context learning (ICL) from 'next-token' training has been treated as something deeply tied to 𝐡𝐮𝐦𝐚𝐧 𝐥𝐚𝐧𝐠𝐮𝐚𝐠𝐞. But … is it?

Am I evil? Am I likeable? Need a 10 minutes break? Like Fantasy? Loath it? Take part in our study and help us by rating images of fictional characters here: bixprag.lili.uni-bielefeld.de/publix/0aSWK...

For this week’s group colloquium, we invited Loulou Kosmala from Paris-Est Créteil University. She gave a talk on multimodal feedback during all types of conversation, from real life to virtual, from learners to adults, from L1 to L2, and more! 🤩

As part of this year's BabyLM challenge, we (researchers from @gronlp.bsky.social and @clausebielefeld.bsky.social diverged from established pretraining paradigm by training only on dialogue data from CHILDES.

Preprint alert! We release BabyBabelLM, a multilingual benchmark of developmentally plausible training data. I was responsible for German and Polish data as well as various child-directed wikis. Immensely rewarding project with exceptionally cool co-authors. 🥳🚀

𝐃𝐨 𝐲𝐨𝐮 𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐥𝐥𝐲 𝐰𝐚𝐧𝐭 𝐭𝐨 𝐬𝐞𝐞 𝐰𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐦𝐮𝐥𝐭𝐢𝐥𝐢𝐧𝐠𝐮𝐚𝐥 𝐞𝐟𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐭 𝐥𝐨𝐨𝐤𝐬 𝐥𝐢𝐤𝐞? 🇨🇳🇮🇩🇸🇪 Here’s the proof! 𝐁𝐚𝐛𝐲𝐁𝐚𝐛𝐞𝐥𝐋𝐌 is the first Multilingual Benchmark of Developmentally Plausible Training Data available for 45 languages to the NLP community 🎉 arxiv.org/abs/2510.10159

Happening in an hour! 🥳

If you are at #IWCS, then you should not miss Sanne‘s talk ”Not Just Who or What: Modeling the Interaction of Linguistic and Annotator Variation in Hateful Word Interpretation“ (Sanne Hoeken, Özge Alacam, Dong Nguyen, Massimo Poesio, Sina Zarrieß), tomorrow at 16:30! 🕟 @sannehoeken.bsky.social

Sina Zarieß is giving the KONVENS keynote on training BabyLMs #nlproc The slide shows the number of words a 12yo human has seen in their lifetime compared to the numbers of words typical language models have seen in training #llm

Happening now: Sina‘s keynote on our BabyLM work. 🥳

Great first day at #KONVENS2015 today. Looking forward to another engaging day with a keynote by Sina Zarrieß tomorrow 🤓 @clausebielefeld.bsky.social

Don’t miss Sina‘s keynote on BabyLMs at #konvens tomorrow!

Final Keynote of #semdial by David Schlangen on ”Meaningful Interaction with Unreal Speakers?“ 😇💬

Final day at #semdial2025 #bialogue — four more presentations, one key note and hopefully many engaging discussions. Let's go!

Second #semdial keynote by Robert Hawkins on ”Foraging for common ground“

Day 2 of #semdial starts with a session on LMs and dialogue systems 🤩

And the second talk features contributions by our PI Sina Zarrieß. 🤩

#semdial has begun 💬

#semdial is about to begin 🥳

#semdial2025, the long-awaited #bialogue conference starts tomorrow! We are looking forward to three wonderful conference days, featuring three exciting keynotes, and many oral and poster presentations on the semantics and pragmatics of dialogue. 👄💬 Check out the program and proceedings below. 👇

Is simpler child-directed language easier to learn? Check out our CoNLL paper "Do Construction Distributions Shape Formal Language Learning in German BabyLMs?" @conll-conf.bsky.social

Our PI Sina will give an oral presentation on "Components of Creativity: Language Model-based Predictors for Clustering and Switching in Verbal Fluency" at @conll-conf.bsky.social in 45 minutes. Come check it out if you are at @aclmeeting.bsky.social #ACL2025NLP

Impromptu dinner after @conll-conf.bsky.social #ACL2025NLP, connecting Bielefeld and the Netherlands over Greek food 😇👌

Happening now: catch Simeon, Manar and Larissa presenting their paper -Are Multimodal Large Language Models Pragmatically Competent Listeners in Simple Reference Resolution Tasks?- in hall X5. #ACL2025NLP

Happening now — Clara, Judith and Sina present their poster: Can LLMs Ground when they (Don’t) Know: A Study on Direct and Loaded Political Questions (Poster board 45) #ACL2025NLP

The CLAUSE group from Bielefeld University is looking forward to next month‘s ACL in Vienna, where we will be presenting quite a few papers. 🥳 Feel free to get in touch if you want to know more. 😇

The CLAUSE group from Bielefeld University is looking forward to next month‘s ACL in Vienna, where we will be presenting quite a few papers. 🥳 Feel free to get in touch if you want to know more. 😇

Muchas gracias @stefanhartmann.bsky.social for inviting me! Can’t even tell what I enjoyed more — discussing LLMs with your students or the Ramen we had afterwards. 😁🍜

Someone on Threads noticed you can type any random sentence into Google, then add “meaning” afterwards, and you’ll get an AI explanation of a famous idiom or phrase you just made up. Here is mine

We just released the first version of our German BabyLM corpus: huggingface.co/datasets/bbu... It contains 16.5M words of (more or less) developmentally plausible, child-directed, child-produced or at least child-available speech 🤓

Preprint alert! We tested how related word learning and syntactic learning are in small language models: arxiv.org/abs/2502.12835

ICYMI: Bielefeld University is hosting the “Digital Humanities im deutschsprachigen Raum 2025” this week! 🤩 #DHd25 We are most excited for tomorrow‘s opening keynote by @dingemansemark.bsky.social, titled ‘Why are LLMs so irresistable?’. If you’re in the area, stop by at the newly reopened Audimax!

ICYMI: We are hosting Bialogue 2025, the 29th Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue, in Bielefeld (September 3–5, 2025) this year! 🤯🙂‍↕️ Check out the CfP here: semdial2025.github.io/cfp/

Currently at #COLING2025! Check out my talk on small language models, small vocabularies and pretraining on phonemes tomorrow at 2pm — session 3 (discourse, phonology and syntax). 👀🗣️

Time to wrap up our 2024 review🎆We proudly look back on many international conferences where SAIL members presented their research, such as @emnlpmeeting.bsky.social or #CIKM.🤩👏 Another highlight was our retreat, where we were able to exchange ideas intensively.💬🤝See you in 2025!🥳

Lola from our sister lab, the Digital Linguistics lab, is handing in her thesis today. We are so proud of what she has achieved in the last three years! 🤖💬💁‍♀️

Currently, I'm mostly looking into how machines learn language. My oldest passion, however, is human language acquisition! And finally, the following article by Holger Diessel and me has been published in First Language! doi.org/10.1177/0142...

Our PI Sina Zarrieß is currently participating in a Dagstuhl Perspectives Workshop on Human in the Loop Learning through Grounded Interaction in Games. Read more about it below: www.dagstuhl.de/en/seminars/...

Our PI Sina and our PhD student Marc are both members of the „Mapping Evidence to Theory in Ecology“ group at ZiF Bielefeld. Read up on their current work below…

Our paper “Small Language Models Like Small Vocabularies: Probing the Linguistic Abilities of Grapheme- and Phoneme-Based Baby Llamas”, led by @bbunzeck.bsky.social, got accepted to #COLING 🥳 Stay tuned for the (soon updated) preprint, and find the pre-review version below!

We are (still) looking for Researcher (full-time, PhD or PostDoc) to work on measuring linguistic creativity in different genres. Part of a newly established Research Centre on Linguistic Creativity in Communication, fully funded for 3 years! uni-bielefeld.hr4you.org/job/view/379...

PSA: Please link to your papers in your threads about them

Poster time! Catch Judith and Simeon presenting “The Illusion of Competence: Evaluating the Effect of Explanations on Users' Mental Models of Visual Question Answering Systems” in the downstairs poster room at @emnlpmeeting.bsky.social #emnlp2024

Check out our PI Prof. Sina Zarrieß presenting “Evaluating Diversity in Automatic Poetry Generation” at the #emnlp2024 poster session right now!

The majority of our group is at EMNLP in Miami right now -- say 'hi' if you see us!

Come be my colleague! Open PhD position on Computational Linguistics/Digital Humanities at Bielefeld University: uni-bielefeld.hr4you.org/job/view/379...

As everyone is joining this place now, we have decided to do so as well!