license: cc-by-sa-4.0
language:
- de
pretty_name: BabyLM (German)
size_categories:
- 10M<n<100M
German BabyLM dataset
This is a pre-training dataset for training developmentally plausible language models in German (also called BabyLMs), compiled by the Computational Linguistics Group (CLAUSE) at Bielefeld University.
If you are looking for ways to evaluate your German BabyLMs, we recommend our own lexical decision dataset, CLAMS for syntactic evaluation and XCOMPS for conceptual semantics/world knowledge.
The composition is inspired by the original, English BabyLM dataset (see babylm.github.io), more info can be found in our paper, see also below for bib reference). It contains 16.5M words from a variety of sources:
| Dataset | Description | # Words |
|---|---|---|
| CHILDES | Child-directed speech | 3,626,301 |
| CHILDES | Child speech | 1,511,144 |
| OpenSubtitles | Movie subtitles | 1,543,094 |
| CallHome | Phone conversations | 176,313 |
| Klexikon | Children's online encyclopedia | 1,384,891 |
| MiniKlexikon | Simplified online encyclopedia | 272,886 |
| Wikibooks Wikijunior | Educational books | 226,773 |
| Fluter | German youth magazine | 2,862,278 |
| Project Gutenberg | Literature (children's and young adult) | 2,476,133 |
| Dreambank | Dream reports | 939,197 |
| Leipzig corpus news texts | Short news texts | 1,541,803 |
| Total | 16,560,813 |
The CHILDES data were taken from the CHILDES database for German.
OpenSubtitles data was sourced from OPUS.
CallHome data was taken from TalkBank.
We collected the Klexikon, MiniKlexikon, Wikibooks and Fluter data ourselves.
Book data was downloaded from Project Gutenberg.
Dreambank data was extracted from this dataset.
The news texts were downloaded from the Leipzig corpora.
If you use our BabyLM dataset, please cite the following preprint:
@misc{bunzeck2025constructiondistributionsshapeformal,
title={Do Construction Distributions Shape Formal Language Learning In German BabyLMs?},
author={Bastian Bunzeck and Daniel Duran and Sina Zarrieß},
year={2025},
eprint={2503.11593},
archivePrefix={arXiv},
primaryClass={cs.CL},
url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.11593},
}