nikitastheo/phonelm-eval

Bilingual Phoneme BabyLMs: evaluation data

The minimal-pair evaluation data used in Cross-Linguistic Effects in Bilingual Phoneme BabyLMs, in orthographic and phonemic form. It is exactly what src/scripts/prepare_eval.py in the code repository produces, provided for anyone who cannot run the espeak-ng phonemizer.

Download

From the root of the code repository:

hf download nikitastheo/phonelm-eval --repo-type dataset --local-dir data --exclude README.md

This places eval_text/ and eval_phone/ under data/, where the evaluation scripts expect them.

Contents

Benchmark	eval_text/	eval_phone/	Pairs
BLiMP (filtered), 67 phenomena	blimp/	blimp/	59,875
BabySLM syntactic	babyslm_syntactic/	babyslm_syntactic/	8,640
BabySLM lexical	—	babyslm_lexical/	71,408
MultiBLiMP English	mblimp/eng/	mblimp/eng/	770
MultiBLiMP German	mblimp/deu/	mblimp/deu/	2,298
MultiBLiMP Persian	mblimp/pes/	mblimp/pes/	2,553
MultiBLiMP Basque	mblimp/eus/	mblimp/eus/	273

Each file is JSON Lines with one minimal pair per line (sentence_good, sentence_bad, plus the benchmark's own fields). BabySLM lexical only exists phonemically.

The phonemic versions of BLiMP and MultiBLiMP were produced with G2P+ using the espeak-ng backend, in each sentence's own language. Phonemes are space-separated, words are separated by WORD_BOUNDARY, and each sentence ends with UTT_BOUNDARY. BabySLM ships its own phonemic transcriptions.

Sources and licences

Each subset keeps the licence of its source:

• BLiMP: the filtered version from the BabyLM 2026 evaluation set. BLiMP is released under CC BY 4.0. Warstadt et al. (2020), BLiMP: The Benchmark of Linguistic Minimal Pairs for English.
• BabySLM: from nikitastheo/babyslm. The original authors do not state a licence. Lavechin et al. (2023), BabySLM: language-acquisition-friendly benchmark of self-supervised spoken language models.
• MultiBLiMP: from jumelet/multiblimp, CC BY 4.0. Jumelet et al. (2025), MultiBLiMP 1.0: A Massively Multilingual Benchmark of Linguistic Minimal Pairs.

Please cite the original benchmarks alongside our paper.

Citation

@misc{theodoropoulos2026crosslinguistic,
  title         = {Cross-Linguistic Effects in Bilingual Phoneme BabyLMs},
  author        = {Theodoropoulos, Nikitas and Lymperaiou, Maria and Filandrianos, Giorgos},
  year          = {2026},
  eprint        = {2609.37121},
  archivePrefix = {arXiv},
  primaryClass  = {cs.CL},
  url           = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.37121}
}