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title: README
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## 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/) - 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)](https://www.cai.cam.ac.uk/news/computational-linguistics-prizes-caians )

- 👀 [LookingtoLearn](https://aclanthology.org/2025.babylm-main.15/) by Bianca-Mihaela Ganescu, Suchir Salhan, Andrew Caines & Paula Buttery.  [Check out LookingtoLearn on HuggingFace](https://huggingface.co/LookingtoLearn), or our paper on the [ACL Anthology](https://aclanthology.org/2025.babylm-main.15/).
- 🐣 [ContingentChat](https://aclanthology.org/2025.babylm-main.25/) by Suchir Salhan, Hongyi Gu, Donya Rooein, Diana Galvan-Sosa, Gabrielle Gaudeau, Andrew Caines, Zheng Yuan, Paula Buttery.  [Check out ContingentChat on HuggingFace](https://huggingface.co/Contingent-Chat), or our paper on the [ACL Anthology](https://aclanthology.org/2025.babylm-main.25/). 

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

*Content provided by [Suchir Salhan](https://huggingface.co/suchirsalhan)*