🤖 AI Summary
Children and adolescents are in a critical period of language development, exhibiting linguistic characteristics that markedly differ from those of adults; however, age-appropriate, large-scale, and high-quality French textual resources remain scarce. To address this gap, this study presents French-YMCA, the first systematically constructed open-access corpus spanning the full developmental range from childhood through adolescence. Comprising 39,200 normative texts totaling over 22.47 million words, the corpus was assembled through multi-source collection, rigorous cleaning, and standardized processing. An accompanying open-access platform ensures broad usability. French-YMCA fills a critical void in French youth language resources and provides essential support for training age-adapted language models and enhancing the comprehensibility and developmental appropriateness of digital interactions.
📝 Abstract
In this paper, we introduce the French-YMCA corpus, a new linguistic resource specifically tailored for children and adolescents. The motivation for building this corpus is clear: children have unique language requirements, as their language skills are in constant evolution and differ from those of adults. With an extensive collection of 39,200 text files, the French-YMCA corpus encompasses a total of 22,471,898 words. It distinguishes itself through its diverse sources, consistent grammar and spelling, and the commitment to providing open online accessibility for all. Such corpus can serve as the foundation for training language models that understand and anticipate youth's language, thereby enhancing the quality of digital interactions and ensuring that responses and suggestions are age-appropriate and adapted to the comprehension level of users of this age.