Jieun Han

Jieun Han, Daniel Lee, Haneul Yoo et al.

Personalized learning has gained attention in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) education, where engagement and motivation play crucial roles in reading comprehension. We propose a novel approach to generating personalized English reading comprehension tests tailored to students' interests. We develop a structured content transcreation pipeline using OpenAI's gpt-4o, where we start with the RACE-C dataset, and generate new passages and multiple-choice reading comprehension questions that are linguistically similar to the original passages but semantically aligned with individual learners' interests. Our methodology integrates topic extraction, question classification based on Bloom's taxonomy, linguistic feature analysis, and content transcreation to enhance student engagement. We conduct a controlled experiment with EFL learners in South Korea to examine the impact of interest-aligned reading materials on comprehension and motivation. Our results show students learning with personalized reading passages demonstrate improved comprehension and motivation retention compared to those learning with non-personalized materials.

Donghoon Shin, Sejung Lee, Soonmin Bae et al.

We introduce Mi:dm 2.0, a bilingual large language model (LLM) specifically engineered to advance Korea-centric AI. This model goes beyond Korean text processing by integrating the values, reasoning patterns, and commonsense knowledge inherent to Korean society, enabling nuanced understanding of cultural contexts, emotional subtleties, and real-world scenarios to generate reliable and culturally appropriate responses. To address limitations of existing LLMs, often caused by insufficient or low-quality Korean data and lack of cultural alignment, Mi:dm 2.0 emphasizes robust data quality through a comprehensive pipeline that includes proprietary data cleansing, high-quality synthetic data generation, strategic data mixing with curriculum learning, and a custom Korean-optimized tokenizer to improve efficiency and coverage. To realize this vision, we offer two complementary configurations: Mi:dm 2.0 Base (11.5B parameters), built with a depth-up scaling strategy for general-purpose use, and Mi:dm 2.0 Mini (2.3B parameters), optimized for resource-constrained environments and specialized tasks. Mi:dm 2.0 achieves state-of-the-art performance on Korean-specific benchmarks, with top-tier zero-shot results on KMMLU and strong internal evaluation results across language, humanities, and social science tasks. The Mi:dm 2.0 lineup is released under the MIT license to support extensive research and commercial use. By offering accessible and high-performance Korea-centric LLMs, KT aims to accelerate AI adoption across Korean industries, public services, and education, strengthen the Korean AI developer community, and lay the groundwork for the broader vision of K-intelligence. Our models are available at https://huggingface.co/K-intelligence. For technical inquiries, please contact midm-llm@kt.com.

Daniel Lee, Harsh Sharma, Jieun Han et al.

Translating knowledge-intensive and entity-rich text between English and Korean requires transcreation to preserve language-specific and cultural nuances beyond literal, phonetic or word-for-word conversion. We evaluate 13 models (LLMs and MT models) using automatic metrics and human assessment by bilingual annotators. Our findings show LLMs outperform traditional MT systems but struggle with entity translation requiring cultural adaptation. By constructing an error taxonomy, we identify incorrect responses and entity name errors as key issues, with performance varying by entity type and popularity level. This work exposes gaps in automatic evaluation metrics and hope to enable future work in completing culturally-nuanced machine translation.

Jimin Sohn, Jeihee Cho, Junyong Lee et al.

Positive thinking is thought to be an important component of self-motivation in various practical fields such as education and the workplace. Previous work, including sentiment transfer and positive reframing, has focused on the positive side of language. However, self-motivation that drives people to reach their goals has not yet been studied from a computational perspective. Moreover, negative feedback has not yet been explored, even though positive and negative feedback are both necessary to grow self-motivation. To facilitate self-motivation, we propose CArrot and STICk (CASTIC) dataset, consisting of 12,590 sentences with 5 different strategies for enhancing self-motivation. Our data and code are publicly available at here.