BLiSS 1.0: Evaluating Bilingual Learner Competence in Second Language Small Language Models

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2510.19419v1
• Date: Wed, 22 Oct 2025 09:42:01 GMT
• Title: BLiSS 1.0: Evaluating Bilingual Learner Competence in Second Language Small Language Models
• Authors: Yuan Gao, Suchir Salhan, Andrew Caines, Paula Buttery, Weiwei Sun,
• Abstract summary: BLiSS 1.0 is a Benchmark of Learner Interlingual Syntactic Structure.<n>It tests whether a model finds a naturalistic learner error more plausible than a matched, artificial error.<n>We provide 136,867 controlled triplets (corrected, learner, artificial) for this purpose.
• Score: 10.028672903585777
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: To bridge the gap between performance-oriented benchmarks and the evaluation of cognitively inspired models, we introduce BLiSS 1.0, a Benchmark of Learner Interlingual Syntactic Structure. Our benchmark operationalizes a new paradigm of selective tolerance, testing whether a model finds a naturalistic learner error more plausible than a matched, artificial error within the same sentence. Constructed from over 2.8 million naturalistic learner sentences, BLiSS provides 136,867 controlled triplets (corrected, learner, artificial) for this purpose. Experiments on a diverse suite of models demonstrate that selective tolerance is a distinct capability from standard grammaticality, with performance clustering strongly by training paradigm. This validates BLiSS as a robust tool for measuring how different training objectives impact a model's alignment with the systematic patterns of human language acquisition.

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