Can training neural language models on a curriculum with developmentally plausible data improve alignment with human reading behavior?

Abstract

The use of neural language models to model human behavior has met with mixed success. While some work has found that the surprisal estimates from these models can be used to predict a wide range of human neural and behavioral responses, other work studying more complex syntactic phenomena has found that these surprisal estimates generate incorrect behavioral predictions. This paper explores the extent to which the misalignment between empirical and model-predicted behavior can be minimized by training models on more developmentally plausible data, such as in the BabyLM Challenge. We trained teacher language models on the BabyLM "strict-small" dataset and used sentence level surprisal estimates from these teacher models to create a curriculum. We found tentative evidence that our curriculum made it easier for models to acquire linguistic knowledge from the training data: on the subset of tasks in the BabyLM challenge suite evaluating models' grammatical knowledge of English, models first trained on the BabyLM data curriculum and then on a few randomly ordered training epochs performed slightly better than models trained on randomly ordered epochs alone. This improved linguistic knowledge acquisition did not result in better alignment with human reading behavior, however: models trained on the BabyLM dataset (with or without a curriculum) generated predictions that were as misaligned with human behavior as models trained on larger less curated datasets. This suggests that training on developmentally plausible datasets alone is likely insufficient to generate language models capable of accurately predicting human language processing.