Small but Significant: On the Promise of Small Language Models for Accessible AIED

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Wei, Yumou, Carvalho, Paulo, Stamper, John
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Wei, Yumou
Carvalho, Paulo
Stamper, John
author_facet Wei, Yumou
Carvalho, Paulo
Stamper, John
contents GPT has become nearly synonymous with large language models (LLMs), an increasingly popular term in AIED proceedings. A simple keyword-based search reveals that 61% of the 76 long and short papers presented at AIED 2024 describe novel solutions using LLMs to address some of the long-standing challenges in education, and 43% specifically mention GPT. Although LLMs pioneered by GPT create exciting opportunities to strengthen the impact of AI on education, we argue that the field's predominant focus on GPT and other resource-intensive LLMs (with more than 10B parameters) risks neglecting the potential impact that small language models (SLMs) can make in providing resource-constrained institutions with equitable and affordable access to high-quality AI tools. Supported by positive results on knowledge component (KC) discovery, a critical challenge in AIED, we demonstrate that SLMs such as Phi-2 can produce an effective solution without elaborate prompting strategies. Hence, we call for more attention to developing SLM-based AIED approaches.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_08588
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Small but Significant: On the Promise of Small Language Models for Accessible AIED
Wei, Yumou
Carvalho, Paulo
Stamper, John
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Computers and Society
Human-Computer Interaction
GPT has become nearly synonymous with large language models (LLMs), an increasingly popular term in AIED proceedings. A simple keyword-based search reveals that 61% of the 76 long and short papers presented at AIED 2024 describe novel solutions using LLMs to address some of the long-standing challenges in education, and 43% specifically mention GPT. Although LLMs pioneered by GPT create exciting opportunities to strengthen the impact of AI on education, we argue that the field's predominant focus on GPT and other resource-intensive LLMs (with more than 10B parameters) risks neglecting the potential impact that small language models (SLMs) can make in providing resource-constrained institutions with equitable and affordable access to high-quality AI tools. Supported by positive results on knowledge component (KC) discovery, a critical challenge in AIED, we demonstrate that SLMs such as Phi-2 can produce an effective solution without elaborate prompting strategies. Hence, we call for more attention to developing SLM-based AIED approaches.
title Small but Significant: On the Promise of Small Language Models for Accessible AIED
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Computers and Society
Human-Computer Interaction
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.08588