The Cambridge University Institute for Automated Language Teaching and Assessment (ALTA) is a virtual institute which brings together teams from computing, engineering, linguistics and language assessment to investigate new ways of using technology to enhance language learning and to develop cutting-edge approaches to assessment which will benefit learners and teachers worldwide. It forms part of Cambridge University’s interdisciplinary Language Sciences Initiative.

Recent News & Updates:

Language Model Evaluations and Benchmarking:

• Are Language Models aligned with second language learners? Yuan Gao, Suchir Salhan, Andrew Caines, Weiwei Sun & Paula Buttery release BLiSS 1.0, a Benchmark of Learner Interlingual Syntactic Structure. Check out the dataset here: https://huggingface.co/datasets/ALTACambridge/BLiSS. 🚨 Use our BLISS Dataset Reconstruction Toolkit - https://github.com/suchirsalhan/bliss/

BabyLM Projects:

ALTA Computer Science & Technology members recently won two outstanding paper awards (see the news feature on the Gonville & Caius College Website)

• 👀 LookingtoLearn by Bianca-Mihaela Ganescu, Suchir Salhan, Andrew Caines & Paula Buttery. Check out LookingtoLearn on HuggingFace, or our paper on the ACL Anthology.
• 🐣 ContingentChat by Suchir Salhan, Hongyi Gu, Donya Rooein, Diana Galvan-Sosa, Gabrielle Gaudeau, Andrew Caines, Zheng Yuan, Paula Buttery. Check out ContingentChat on HuggingFace, or our paper on the ACL Anthology.

This is the third consecutive year that our group has won this award.

Content provided by Suchir Salhan