Children increasingly have access to Large Language Models (LLMs), which may expose them to responses that are developmentally inappropriate or require age-sensitive safety, guidance, and boundaries. Existing LLM safety evaluations largely focus on harmful-content avoidance and do not explicitly target child-facing safety. We introduce KIDBench, a benchmark for evaluating child-facing LLM safety for ages 7-11 using a developmental-psychology-grounded LLM-as-a-Judge rubric. KIDBench contains realistic child queries across ten categories, with single-turn prompts and multi-turn child-actor simulations. We compare no-cues prompts with no child context, implicit-cues prompts that suggest a child speaker, and explicit age instructions. Implicit-cues improve scores by 9-47% across models, while explicit age adds a further 10-30% gain. Cross-lingual and cultural evaluations show uneven safety behavior across languages and country contexts. Multi-turn simulations show that child-facing response quality can degrade by 6-24% from the first to worst turn. Beyond evaluation, we introduce KIDGuardLlama, a child-safety evaluator, and KIDLlama, a child-oriented response model, showing how KIDBenc
In this work, we explain our approach employed in the BabyLM Challenge, which uses various methods of training language models (LMs) with significantly less data compared to traditional large language models (LLMs) and are inspired by how human children learn. While a human child is exposed to far less linguistic input than an LLM, they still achieve remarkable language understanding and generation abilities. To this end, we develop a model trained on a curated dataset consisting of 10 million words, primarily sourced from child-directed transcripts. The 2024 BabyLM Challenge initial dataset of 10M words is filtered to 8.5M. Next, it is supplemented with a randomly selected subset of TVR dataset consisting of 1.5M words of television dialogues. The latter dataset ensures that similar to children, the model is also exposed to language through media. Furthermore, we reduce the vocabulary size to 32,000 tokens, aligning it with the limited vocabulary of children in the early stages of language acquisition. We use curriculum learning and is able to match the baseline on certain benchmarks while surpassing the baseline on others. Additionally, incorporating common LLM training datasets,
An exploratory, descriptive analysis is presented of the national orientation of scientific, scholarly journals as reflected in the affiliations of publishing or citing authors. It calculates for journals covered in Scopus an Index of National Orientation (INO), and analyses the distribution of INO values across disciplines and countries, and the correlation between INO values and journal impact factors. The study did not find solid evidence that journal impact factors are good measures of journal internationality in terms of the geographical distribution of publishing or citing authors, as the relationship between a journal's national orientation and its citation impact is found to be inverse U-shaped. In addition, journals publishing in English are not necessarily internationally oriented in terms of the affiliations of publishing or citing authors; in social sciences and humanities also USA has their nationally oriented literatures. The paper examines the extent to which nationally oriented journals entering Scopus in earlier years, have become in recent years more international. It is found that in the study set about 40 per cent of such journals does reveal traces of internati
While high-performing language models are typically trained on hundreds of billions of words, human children become fluent language users with a much smaller amount of data. What are the features of the data they receive, and how do these features support language modeling objectives? To investigate this question, we train GPT-2 and RoBERTa models on 29M words of English child-directed speech and a new matched, synthetic dataset (TinyDialogues), comparing to OpenSubtitles, Wikipedia, and a heterogeneous blend of datasets from the BabyLM challenge. We evaluate the syntactic and semantic knowledge of these models using developmentally-inspired evaluations. Through pretraining experiments, we test whether the global developmental ordering or the local discourse ordering of children's training data supports high performance relative to other datasets. The local properties of the data affect model results, but surprisingly, global properties do not. Further, child language input is not uniquely valuable for training language models. These findings support the hypothesis that, rather than proceeding from better data, the child's learning algorithm is substantially more data-efficient tha
We compare the network of aggregated journal-journal citation relations provided by the Journal Citation Reports (JCR) 2012 of the Science and Social Science Citation Indexes (SCI and SSCI) with similar data based on Scopus 2012. First, global maps were developed for the two sets separately; sets of documents can then be compared using overlays to both maps. Using fuzzy-string matching and ISSN numbers, we were able to match 10,524 journal names between the two sets; that is, 96.4% of the 10,936 journals contained in JCR or 51.2% of the 20,554 journals covered by Scopus. Network analysis was then pursued on the set of journals shared between the two databases and the two sets of unique journals. Citations among the shared journals are more comprehensively covered in JCR than Scopus, so the network in JCR is denser and more connected than in Scopus. The ranking of shared journals in terms of indegree (that is, numbers of citing journals) or total citations is similar in both databases overall (Spearman's \r{ho} > 0.97), but some individual journals rank very differently. Journals that are unique to Scopus seem to be less important--they are citing shared journals rather than bein
Rankings of scholarly journals based on citation data are often met with skepticism by the scientific community. Part of the skepticism is due to disparity between the common perception of journals' prestige and their ranking based on citation counts. A more serious concern is the inappropriate use of journal rankings to evaluate the scientific influence of authors. This paper focuses on analysis of the table of cross-citations among a selection of Statistics journals. Data are collected from the Web of Science database published by Thomson Reuters. Our results suggest that modelling the exchange of citations between journals is useful to highlight the most prestigious journals, but also that journal citation data are characterized by considerable heterogeneity, which needs to be properly summarized. Inferential conclusions require care in order to avoid potential over-interpretation of insignificant differences between journal ratings. Comparison with published ratings of institutions from the UK's Research Assessment Exercise shows strong correlation at aggregate level between assessed research quality and journal citation `export scores' within the discipline of Statistics.
Child literacy is a strong predictor of life outcomes at the subsequent stages of an individual's life. This points to a need for targeted interventions in vulnerable low and middle income populations to help bridge the gap between literacy levels in these regions and high income ones. In this effort, reading assessments provide an important tool to measure the effectiveness of these programs and AI can be a reliable and economical tool to support educators with this task. Developing accurate automatic reading assessment systems for child speech in low-resource languages poses significant challenges due to limited data and the unique acoustic properties of children's voices. This study focuses on Xhosa, a language spoken in South Africa, to advance child speech recognition capabilities. We present a novel dataset composed of child speech samples in Xhosa. The dataset is available upon request and contains ten words and letters, which are part of the Early Grade Reading Assessment (EGRA) system. Each recording is labeled with an online and cost-effective approach by multiple markers and a subsample is validated by an independent EGRA reviewer. This dataset is evaluated with three fi
Child speech differs from adult speech in acoustics, prosody, and language development, and disfluencies (repetitions, prolongations, blocks) further challenge Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and downstream Natural Language Processing (NLP). Recent large audio-language models (LALMs) demonstrate strong cross-modal audio understanding; however, their behavior in disfluent child speech remains underexplored. We evaluate several state-of-the-art LALMs in two settings: an interview (mixed speakers) and a reading task (single child). The tasks are (i) single-channel source separation to isolate the child and (ii) child-only summarization that preserves clinically relevant disfluencies and avoids adult-speech leakage. Evaluation combines Large Language Model (LLM) as a judge, human expert ratings, and BERTScore (F1), and we report agreement between models and between models and humans to assess reliability. Our findings delineate the conditions under which LALMs produce faithful child-only summaries from mixed audio and where they fail, offering practical guidance for clinical and educational deployments. We provide prompts and evaluation scripts to support replication.
Language models (LMs) have demonstrated remarkable proficiency in generating linguistically coherent text, sparking discussions about their relevance to understanding human language learnability. However, a significant gap exists between the training data for these models and the linguistic input a child receives. LMs are typically trained on data that is orders of magnitude larger and fundamentally different from child-directed speech (Warstadt and Bowman, 2022; Warstadt et al., 2023; Frank, 2023a). Addressing this discrepancy, our research focuses on training LMs on subsets of a single child's linguistic input. Previously, Wang, Vong, Kim, and Lake (2023) found that LMs trained in this setting can form syntactic and semantic word clusters and develop sensitivity to certain linguistic phenomena, but they only considered LSTMs and simpler neural networks trained from just one single-child dataset. Here, to examine the robustness of learnability from single-child input, we systematically train six different model architectures on five datasets (3 single-child and 2 baselines). We find that the models trained on single-child datasets showed consistent results that matched with previo
Using the Scopus dataset (1996-2007) a grand matrix of aggregated journal-journal citations was constructed. This matrix can be compared in terms of the network structures with the matrix contained in the Journal Citation Reports (JCR) of the Institute of Scientific Information (ISI). Since the Scopus database contains a larger number of journals and covers also the humanities, one would expect richer maps. However, the matrix is in this case sparser than in the case of the ISI data. This is due to (i) the larger number of journals covered by Scopus and (ii) the historical record of citations older than ten years contained in the ISI database. When the data is highly structured, as in the case of large journals, the maps are comparable, although one may have to vary a threshold (because of the differences in densities). In the case of interdisciplinary journals and journals in the social sciences and humanities, the new database does not add a lot to what is possible with the ISI databases.
LLMs can generate human-like dialogues, yet their ability to simulate early child-adult interactions remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we examined how effectively LLMs can capture the distinctive features of child-caregiver language in interaction, using both static and interactive benchmarking methods. We found that state-of-the-art LLMs like Llama 3 and GPT-4o can approximate child-caregiver dialogues at the word and utterance level, but they struggle to reproduce the child and caregiver's discursive patterns, exaggerate alignment, and fail to reach the level of diversity shown by humans. The broader goal of this work is to initiate the development of a comprehensive benchmark for LLMs in child-oriented applications.
This work reimplements a recent semantic bootstrapping child-language acquisition model, which was originally designed for English, and trains it to learn a new language: Hebrew. The model learns from pairs of utterances and logical forms as meaning representations, and acquires both syntax and word meanings simultaneously. The results show that the model mostly transfers to Hebrew, but that a number of factors, including the richer morphology in Hebrew, makes the learning slower and less robust. This suggests that a clear direction for future work is to enable the model to leverage the similarities between different word forms.
Automatic spoken language identification (LID) is a very important research field in the era of multilingual voice-command-based human-computer interaction (HCI). A front-end LID module helps to improve the performance of many speech-based applications in the multilingual scenario. India is a populous country with diverse cultures and languages. The majority of the Indian population needs to use their respective native languages for verbal interaction with machines. Therefore, the development of efficient Indian spoken language recognition systems is useful for adapting smart technologies in every section of Indian society. The field of Indian LID has started gaining momentum in the last two decades, mainly due to the development of several standard multilingual speech corpora for the Indian languages. Even though significant research progress has already been made in this field, to the best of our knowledge, there are not many attempts to analytically review them collectively. In this work, we have conducted one of the very first attempts to present a comprehensive review of the Indian spoken language recognition research field. In-depth analysis has been presented to emphasize th
Based on the field investigation of West Bengal, this paper investigates whether the school-aged children of the marginal farmer households are full-time paid labourers or unpaid domestic labourers along with schooling or regular students. Probit Regression analysis is applied here to assess the influencing factors for reducing the size of the child labour force in practice. The result shows that the higher is the earning of the adult members of the households, the lower is the incidence of child labour. Moreover, the credit accessibility of the mother from the Self-help group and more person-days of the father in work in a reference year are also responsible for reducing the possibility of a child turning into labour. The study further suggests that the younger age of the father, education of fathers, and low operational landholdings are positive and significant determinants to decide on a child education by restricting their excessive domestic work burden.
A number of journal classification systems have been developed in bibliometrics since the launch of the Citation Indices by the Institute of Scientific Information (ISI) in the 1960s. These systems are used to normalize citation counts with respect to field-specific citation patterns. The best known system is the so-called "Web-of-Science Subject Categories" (WCs). In other systems papers are classified by algorithmic solutions. Using the Journal Citation Reports 2014 of the Science Citation Index and the Social Science Citation Index (n of journals = 11,149), we examine options for developing a new system based on journal classifications into subject categories using aggregated journal-journal citation data. Combining routines in VOSviewer and Pajek, a tree-like classification is developed. At each level one can generate a map of science for all the journals subsumed under a category. Nine major fields are distinguished at the top level. Further decomposition of the social sciences is pursued for the sake of example with a focus on journals in information science (LIS) and science studies (STS). The new classification system improves on alternative options by avoiding the problem
Around ten percent of children may present with a disorder where language does not develop as expected. This often affects vocabulary skills, i.e., finding the words to express wants, needs and ideas, which can influence behaviours linked to wellbeing and daily functioning, such as concentration, independence, social interactions and managing emotions. Without specialist support, needs can increase in severity and continue to adulthood. The type of support, known as interventions, showing strongest evidence for improving vocabulary with some signs of improved behaviour and wellbeing are ones that use word webs. These are diagrams consisting of lines that connect sound and meaning information about a word to strengthen the child's word knowledge and use. The diagrams resemble what is commonly known as mind-maps and are widely used by Speech and Language Therapists in partnership with school educators to help children with language difficulties. In addition, interventions delivered through mobile-devices has led in some cases to increased vocabulary gains with positive influence on wellbeing and academic attainment. With advances in technology and availability of user-friendly mobile
Reliable transcription of child-adult conversations in clinical settings is crucial for diagnosing developmental disorders like Autism. Recent advances in deep learning and availability of large scale transcribed data has led to development of speech foundation models that have shown dramatic improvements in ASR performance. However, their performance on conversational child-adult interactions remains underexplored. In this work, we provide a comprehensive evaluation of ASR performance on a dataset containing child-adult interactions from autism diagnostic sessions, using Whisper, Wav2Vec2, HuBERT, and WavLM. We find that speech foundation models show a noticeable performance drop (15-20% absolute WER) for child speech compared to adult speech in the conversational setting. Then, we fine-tune the best-performing zero-shot model (Whisper-large) using LoRA in a low-resource setting, yielding 8% and 13% absolute WER improvements for child and adult speech, respectively.
Using "Analyze Results" at the Web of Science, one can directly generate overlays onto global journal maps of science. The maps are based on the 10,000+ journals contained in the Journal Citation Reports (JCR) of the Science and Social Science Citation Indices (2011). The disciplinary diversity of the retrieval is measured in terms of Rao-Stirling's "quadratic entropy." Since this indicator of interdisciplinarity is normalized between zero and one, the interdisciplinarity can be compared among document sets and across years, cited or citing. The colors used for the overlays are based on Blondel et al.'s (2008) community-finding algorithms operating on the relations journals included in JCRs. The results can be exported from VOSViewer with different options such as proportional labels, heat maps, or cluster density maps. The maps can also be web-started and/or animated (e.g., using PowerPoint). The "citing" dimension of the aggregated journal-journal citation matrix was found to provide a more comprehensive description than the matrix based on the cited archive. The relations between local and global maps and their different functions in studying the sciences in terms of journal lit
Java Code Generation consists in generating automatically Java code from a Natural Language Text. This NLP task helps in increasing programmers' productivity by providing them with immediate solutions to the simplest and most repetitive tasks. Code generation is a challenging task because of the hard syntactic rules and the necessity of a deep understanding of the semantic aspect of the programming language. Many works tried to tackle this task using either RNN-based, or Transformer-based models. The latter achieved remarkable advancement in the domain and they can be divided into three groups: (1) encoder-only models, (2) decoder-only models, and (3) encoder-decoder models. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive review of the evolution and progress of deep learning models in Java code generation task. We focus on the most important methods and present their merits and limitations, as well as the objective functions used by the community. In addition, we provide a detailed description of datasets and evaluation metrics used in the literature. Finally, we discuss results of different models on CONCODE dataset, then propose some future directions.
Previous research has shown that journal article quality ratings from the cloud based Large Language Model (LLM) families ChatGPT and Gemini and the medium sized open weights LLM Gemma3 27b correlate moderately with expert research quality scores. This article assesses whether other medium sized LLMs, smaller LLMs, and reasoning models have similar abilities. This is tested with Gemma3 variants, Llama4 Scout, Qwen3, Magistral Small and DeepSeek R1 on a dataset of 2,780 medical, health and life science papers in 6 fields, with two different gold standards, one novel. Few-shot and score averaging approaches are also evaluated. The results suggest that medium-sized LLMs have similar performance to ChatGPT 4o-mini and Gemini 2.0 Flash, but that 1b parameters may often, and 4b sometimes, be too few. Reasoning models did not have a clear advantage. Moreover, averaging scores from multiple identical queries seems to be a universally successful strategy, and there is weak evidence that few-shot prompts (four examples) tend to help. Overall, the results show, for the first time, that smaller LLMs >4b have a substantial capability to rate journal articles for research quality, especially