Datasets:

colinglab
/

BAMBI_dataset

dataset_info:
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configs:
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  - config_name: 12_18
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  - config_name: 18_24
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  - config_name: 6_12
    data_files:
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🦌 BAMBI Dataset

Dataset Summary

The BAMBI Dataset is an Italian-language corpus designed to provide ecologically valid and cognitively plausible linguistic input for BabyLM-style language model training. It is organized into four developmental tiers, corresponding to different phases of linguistic growth in childhood and adolescence:

Tier	Age Range (years)	Approx. Tokens	Description
Tier 1	0–6	~26M	Early childhood and preschool exposure
Tier 2	6–12	~31M	Primary school and literacy development
Tier 3	12–18	~32M	Adolescent linguistic expansion
Tier 4	18–24	~31M	Young adult and advanced language exposure

Each tier reflects age-appropriate linguistic input, curated from authentic Italian sources for ecological validity and developmental plausibility.

Data Composition

The corpus integrates transcriptions of oral materials that mirror the linguistic environment of Italian speakers from early childhood through young adulthood.

Source Types

Entertainment: audiobooks, TV shows, podcasts, and films
Educational: textbooks, didactic materials, and learning media
News and informational: simplified news, magazines, and public media
Caregiver and spontaneous speech: naturalistic speech and conversational transcriptions

Each document includes metadata indicating:

Source type
Data origin
Intended age tier

Linguistic Characteristics

Language: Italian 🇮🇹
Register: naturalistic, age-appropriate, and cognitively plausible speech
Total tokens: ~120 million
Format: plain text (.csv) with detailed metadata

Intended Use

The BAMBI dataset is intended for:

Training BabyLM-style or other small-scale developmental language models in Italian
Research on cognitive and linguistic development
Curriculum learning and ecological modeling of language acquisition

Not intended for commercial NLP applications.

Ethical Considerations

TBD

Citation

TBD

More about BAMBI

Suozzi, A., Capone, L., Lebani, G. E., & Lenci, A. (2025). BAMBI: Developing Baby Language Models for Italian. arXiv preprint arXiv:2503.09481.

Capone, L., Suozzi, A., Lebani, G. E., & Lenci, A. (2025). BAMBI Goes to School: Evaluating Italian BabyLMs with Invalsi-ITA. In Proceedings of the Eleventh Italian Conference on Computational Linguistics (CLiC-it 2025) (pp. 1-12). Università di Cagliari.

Capone, L., Suozzi, A., Lebani, G. E., & Lenci, A. (2024). Babies: A benchmark for the linguistic evaluation of italian baby language models. In Proceedings of the 10th Italian Conference on Computational Linguistics (CLiC-it 2024) (pp. 157-170).