Can a Remedy Find a Researcher? Exploring the Development of Semantic Knowledge in Italian BabyLMs
Year: 2026
Type: conference-paper
Abstract: A large body of research has examined the linguistic abilities of language models (LMs) across various languages.However, conclusive evidence regarding their semantic competence and world knowledge remains limited, especially for low-resource languages.In this study, we explore the semantic competence of Italian BabyLMs, focusing on their sensitivity to semantic violations.To this end, we adapt a minimal pair benchmark targeting semantic violations to evaluate the semantic abilities of BAMBI, a family of small-scale models trained on progressively larger and more complex datasets.We further compare their performance, assessed through accuracy, mean log-likelihood offset, and expected calibration error, with that of three larger Italian LMs.Our findings shed light on this aspect of semantic competence in small-scale models and how this is affected by data scale and training strategies.
Institutions: Ca' Foscari University of Venice, University of Pisa
Language: English
Topic: Topic Modeling
Subfield: Artificial Intelligence
Field: Computer Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W7166809623
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