Guanzhong Pan

Guanzhong Pan, Vishal Chodnekar, Abinas Roy et al.

Large language models (LLMs) are becoming increasingly widespread. Organizations that want to use AI for productivity now face an important decision. They can subscribe to commercial LLM services or deploy models on their own infrastructure. Cloud services from providers such as OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google are attractive because they provide easy access to state-of-the-art models and are easy to scale. However, concerns about data privacy, the difficulty of switching service providers, and long-term operating costs have driven interest in local deployment of open-source models. This paper presents a cost-benefit analysis framework to help organizations determine when on-premise LLM deployment becomes economically viable compared to commercial subscription services. We consider the hardware requirements, operational expenses, and performance benchmarks of the latest open-source models, including Qwen, Llama, Mistral, and etc. Then we compare the total cost of deploying these models locally with the major cloud providers subscription fee. Our findings provide an estimated breakeven point based on usage levels and performance needs. These results give organizations a practical framework for planning their LLM strategies.

Guanzhong Pan, Mei Tan, Hyunji Nam et al.

We introduce EduCoder, a domain-specialized tool designed to support utterance-level annotation of educational dialogue. While general-purpose text annotation tools for NLP and qualitative research abound, few address the complexities of coding education dialogue transcripts -- with diverse teacher-student and peer interactions. Common challenges include defining codebooks for complex pedagogical features, supporting both open-ended and categorical coding, and contextualizing utterances with external features, such as the lesson's purpose and the pedagogical value of the instruction. EduCoder is designed to address these challenges by providing a platform for researchers and domain experts to collaboratively define complex codebooks based on observed data. It incorporates both categorical and open-ended annotation types along with contextual materials. Additionally, it offers a side-by-side comparison of multiple annotators' responses, allowing comparison and calibration of annotations with others to improve data reliability. The system is open-source, with a demo video available.