We were very excited to learn that our colleague Martin Hackl and Yoon Kim of the Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science have been awarded a collaborative research grant from the MITHIC SHASS+ Connectivity Fund, which connects scholars in MIT’s School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (SHASS) with colleagues from other parts of the Institute.
Their project is entitled “Landmarks of Human Language Acquisition as Benchmarks for LLMs”:
Children acquire their native language from remarkably limited input: roughly 20 million words by age six. This is orders of magnitude smaller than the training data of LLMs exhibiting sophisticated language abilities. How children accomplish this is not fully understood, nor is the extent to which such LLMs employ analogs of human grammatical knowledge. The project aims to establish a set of developmental landmarks of human language acquisition to be used as benchmarks for purpose-designed mini-LLMs endowed with learning biases hypothesized to enable human language acquisition. Successful models may offer clues to increase efficiency in LLMs more broadly (biomimicry).
Congratulations Martin and Yoon!