{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/kidlm-advancing-language-models-for-children","title":"KidLM: Advancing Language Models for Children -- Early Insights and Future Directions","arxiv_id":"2410.03884","date":"2024-10-04","proceeding":null,"authors":["Mir Tafseer Nayeem","Davood Rafiei"],"abstract":"Recent studies highlight the potential of large language models in creating educational tools for children, yet significant challenges remain in maintaining key child-specific properties such as linguistic nuances, cognitive needs, and safety standards. In this paper, we explore foundational steps toward the development of child-specific language models, emphasizing the necessity of high-quality pre-training data. We introduce a novel user-centric data collection pipeline that involves gathering and validating a corpus specifically written for and sometimes by children. Additionally, we propose a new training objective, Stratified Masking, which dynamically adjusts masking probabilities based on our domain-specific child language data, enabling models to prioritize vocabulary and concepts more suitable for children. Experimental evaluations demonstrate that our model excels in understanding lower grade-level text, maintains safety by avoiding stereotypes, and captures children's unique preferences. Furthermore, we provide actionable insights for future research and development in child-specific language modeling.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.03884v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.03884v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"kidlm-advancing-language-models-for-children","repo_url":"https://github.com/tafseer-nayeem/KidLM","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"language-modeling","task_name":"Language Modeling"},{"task_slug":"language-modelling","task_name":"Language Modelling"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2410.03884","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}