Papers with language development
Babysit A Language Model From Scratch: Interactive Language Learning by Trials and Demonstrations (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models have adopted a non-interactive training paradigm, and refined pre-trained models through feedback afterward. |
| Approach: | They propose a trial-and-demonstration learning framework that incorporates student trials, teacher demonstrations, and a reward conditioned on language competence at various developmental stages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework accelerates word acquisition for student models of equal and smaller numbers of parameters and a strong correlation between the frequency of words in trials and learning curves. |
FABRA: French Aggregator-Based Readability Assessment toolkit (2022.lrec-1)
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Rodrigo Wilkens, David Alfter, Xiaoou Wang, Alice Pintard, Anaïs Tack, Kevin P. Yancey, Thomas François
| Challenge: | a large number of readability predictor variables are used to predict reading difficulty of texts . the most important predictors for native texts are lexical diversity, dependency counts and text coherence . |
| Approach: | They propose a readability toolkit based on aggregation of readability predictor variables . they show which features are most predictive on two different corpora . |
| Outcome: | The proposed toolkit improves performance over standard feature-based readability prediction. |
Beyond Length: Context-Aware Expansion and Independence as Developmentally Sensitive Evaluation in Child Utterances (2026.eacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Common proxies such as Mean Length of Utterance (MLU), lexical diversity (vocd-D), and readability indices are dominated by length and ignore conversational context, missing aspects of response quality such as reasoning depth, topic maintenance, and discourse planning. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that classifies the Previous Adult Utterance Type and scores the child’s response along two axes: Expansion (contextual elaboration and inferential depth) and Independence (the child’ s contribution to advancing the discourse). |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework assesses the child's response along two axes: Expansion (contextual elaboration and inferential depth) and Independence (the child’s contribution to advancing the discourse). |
Analyzing Vocabulary Commonality Index Using Large-scaled Database of Child Language Development (L18-1)
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| Challenge: | a vocabulary commonality index is used to investigate to what extent each child acquires common words during the early stages of lexical development. |
| Approach: | They propose a vocabulary commonality index to investigate to what extent each child acquires common words during the early stages of lexical development. |
| Outcome: | The proposed index can be used to understand to what extent each child acquires common words during the early stages of lexical development. |