We discuss the strategies and results of a small-sized training program based on Italian child-directed speech (less than 3M tokens) for various network architectures. The rationale behind these experiments [1] lies in the attempt to understand the effect of this naturalistic training diet on different models architecture. Preliminary findings lead us to conclude that (a) different tokenization strategies produce only numerical, but not statistically significant, improvements overall, although segmentation aligns more or less with linguistic intuitions; and (b) modified LSTM networks with a single layer and a structurally more controlled cell state perform worse in training (compared to standard one- and two-layered LSTM models) but better on linguistically critical contrasts. This suggests that standard loss/accuracy metrics in autoregressive training procedures are linguistically irrelevant and, more generally, misleading, since the best-trained models qualify as poorer “linguistic theories” ([2], pace [3]).

In this work, we unveil a novel tool for generating Italian crossword puzzles from text, utilizing advanced language models such as GPT-4o, Mistral-7B-Instruct-v0.3, and Llama3-8B-Instruct. Crafted specifically for educational applications, this cutting-edge generator makes use of the comprehensive Italian-Clue-Instruct dataset, which comprises over 30,000 entries including diverse text, solutions, and types of clues. This carefully assembled dataset is designed to facilitate the creation of contextually relevant clues in various styles associated with specific texts and keywords.The study delves into four distinctive styles of crossword clues: those without format constraints, those formed as definite determiner phrases, copular sentences, and bare noun phrases. Each style introduces unique linguistic structures to diversify clue presentation.Given the lack of sophisticated educational tools tailored to the Italian language, this project seeks to enhance learning experiences and cognitive development through an engaging, interactive platform. By meshing state-of-the-art AI with contemporary educational strategies, our tool can dynamically generate crossword puzzles from Italian educational materials, thereby providing an enjoyable and interactive learning environment. This technological advancement not only redefines educational paradigms but also sets a new benchmark for interactive and cognitive language learning solutions.

This paper presents ECWCA (Educational CrossWord Clues Answering), a novel challenge designed to evaluate knowledge and reasoning capabilities of large language models through crossword clue-answering. The challenge consists of two tasks: a standard question-answering format where the LLM has to solve crossword clues, and a variation of it, where the model is receives hints about the word lengths of the answers, which is expected to help models with reasoning abilities. To construct the ECWCA dataset, synthetic clues were generated based on entities and facts extracted from Italian Wikipedia. Generated clues were then selected manually in order to ensure high-quality examples with factually correct and unambiguous clues.

This work explores alternative gating systems in simple Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) that induce linguistically motivated biases during training, ultimately affecting models’ performance on the BLiMP task. We focus exclusively on the BabyLM 10M training corpus (Strict-Small Track). Our experiments reveal that: (i) standard RNN variants—LSTMs and GRUs—are insufficient for properly learning the relevant set of linguistic constraints; (ii) the quality or size of the training corpus has little impact on these networks, as demonstrated by the comparable performance of LSTMs trained exclusively on the child-directed speech portion of the corpus; (iii) increasing the size of the embedding and hidden layers does not significantly improve performance. In contrast, specifically gated RNNs (eMG-RNNs), inspired by certain Minimalist Grammar intuitions, exhibit advantages in both training loss and BLiMP accuracy.