Three Gonville & Caius College postgraduate students have been honoured for their work on small language models and cognitively-inspired Artificial Intelligence.
Bianca Ganescu (Computational Linguistics PhD 2025), Zebulon Goriely (Computational Linguistics PhD 2021) and Suchir Salhan (Computational Linguistics 2020) have won their group’s fourth outstanding paper award for the third year in a row. All three are supervised by Caius Fellow Professor Paula Buttery.
The award was presented at the BabyLM Natural Language Processing Workshop (https://babylm.github.io/) based in EMNLP, a main conference venue for Natural Language Processing and Computational Linguistics. The workshop started in 2023.
Zeb and Churchill College student Richard Diehl Martinez, who is also supervised by Professor Buttery, won outstanding papers awards for their PhD work in 2023 and 2024.
The workshop identifies a small number of papers “that stand out for their originality, clarity, and potential for lasting impact on the BabyLM community”.
2025 Outstanding Paper – ‘Teacher Demonstrations in a BabyLM’s Zone of Proximal Development for Contingent Multi-Turn Interaction’ by Suchir Salhan, Hongyi Gu, Donya Rooein, Diana Galvan-Sosa, Gabrielle Gaudeau, Andrew Caines, Zheng Yuan & Paula Buttery
Pictured, from left to right: Suchir Salhan, Paula Buttery, Bianca Ganescu and Zabulon Goriely
