39.2AIMay 14
Small, Private Language Models as Teammates for Educational Assessment DesignChris Davis Jaldi, Anmol Saini, Shan Zhang et al.
Generative AI increasingly supports educational design tasks, e.g., through Large Language Models (LLMs), demonstrating the capability to design assessment questions that are aligned with pedagogical frameworks (e.g., Bloom's taxonomy). However, they often rely on subjective or limited evaluation methods; focus primarily on proprietary models; or rarely systematically examine generation, evaluation, or deployment constraints in real educational settings. Meanwhile, Small Language Models (SLMs) have emerged as local alternatives that better address privacy and resource limitations; yet their effectiveness for assessment tasks remains underexplored. To address this gap, we systematically compare LLMs and SLMs for assessment question design; evaluate generation quality across Bloom's taxonomy levels using reproducible, pedagogically grounded metrics; and further assess model-based judging against expert-informed evaluation by analyzing reliability and agreement patterns. Results show that SLMs achieve competitive performance across key pedagogically motivated quality dimensions while enabling local, privacy-sensitive deployment. However, model-based evaluations also exhibit systematic inconsistencies and bias relative to expert ratings. These findings provide evidence to posit language models as bounded assistants in assessment workflows; underscore the necessity of Human-in-the-Loop; and advance the automated educational question generation field by examining quality, reliability, and deployment-aware trade-offs.
DLAug 27, 2025
Charting the Future of Scholarly Knowledge with AI: A Community PerspectiveAzanzi Jiomekong, Hande Küçük McGinty, Keith G. Mills et al.
Despite the growing availability of tools designed to support scholarly knowledge extraction and organization, many researchers still rely on manual methods, sometimes due to unfamiliarity with existing technologies or limited access to domain-adapted solutions. Meanwhile, the rapid increase in scholarly publications across disciplines has made it increasingly difficult to stay current, further underscoring the need for scalable, AI-enabled approaches to structuring and synthesizing scholarly knowledge. Various research communities have begun addressing this challenge independently, developing tools and frameworks aimed at building reliable, dynamic, and queryable scholarly knowledge bases. However, limited interaction across these communities has hindered the exchange of methods, models, and best practices, slowing progress toward more integrated solutions. This manuscript identifies ways to foster cross-disciplinary dialogue, identify shared challenges, categorize new collaboration and shape future research directions in scholarly knowledge and organization.
AIJul 12, 2025
Knowledge Conceptualization Impacts RAG EfficacyChris Davis Jaldi, Anmol Saini, Elham Ghiasi et al.
Explainability and interpretability are cornerstones of frontier and next-generation artificial intelligence (AI) systems. This is especially true in recent systems, such as large language models (LLMs), and more broadly, generative AI. On the other hand, adaptability to new domains, contexts, or scenarios is also an important aspect for a successful system. As such, we are particularly interested in how we can merge these two efforts, that is, investigating the design of transferable and interpretable neurosymbolic AI systems. Specifically, we focus on a class of systems referred to as ''Agentic Retrieval-Augmented Generation'' systems, which actively select, interpret, and query knowledge sources in response to natural language prompts. In this paper, we systematically evaluate how different conceptualizations and representations of knowledge, particularly the structure and complexity, impact an AI agent (in this case, an LLM) in effectively querying a triplestore. We report our results, which show that there are impacts from both approaches, and we discuss their impact and implications.