Noah L. Schroeder

Kweku Yamoah, Noah Schroeder, Emmanuel Dorley et al.

Systematic reviews traditionally have taken considerable amounts of human time and energy to complete, in part due to the extensive number of titles and abstracts that must be reviewed for potential inclusion. Recently, researchers have begun to explore how to use large language models (LLMs) to make this process more efficient. However, research to date has shown inconsistent results. We posit this is because prompting alone may not provide sufficient context for the model(s) to perform well. In this study, we fine-tune a small 1.2 billion parameter open-weight LLM specifically for study screening in the context of a systematic review in which humans rated more than 8500 titles and abstracts for potential inclusion. Our results showed strong performance improvements from the fine-tuned model, with the weighted F1 score improving 80.79% compared to the base model. When run on the full dataset of 8,277 studies, the fine-tuned model had 86.40% agreement with the human coder, a 91.18% true positive rate, a 86.38% true negative rate, and perfect agreement across multiple inference runs. Taken together, our results show that there is promise for fine-tuning LLMs for title and abstract screening in large-scale systematic reviews.

Aditi Mallavarapu, Rohan Khandare, Mokshagna Kadiyala et al.

Systematic reviews provide comprehensive syntheses of research fields. As a result, systematic reviews often emphasize synthesizing across the large bodies of literature rather than just describing the studies from which the conclusions were drawn. This risks an incomplete description of the sample - encouraging overgeneralization of the findings, obscuring connections between existing work, or overshadowing gaps in the literature. To address this challenge, we introduce interactive evidence maps; an accessible visualization tool that enables researchers to explore, filter, and analyze review data dynamically. Our approach leverages large language models to extract topic models that structure heterogeneous review data into an interactive, explorable knowledge map that supports deeper inspection beyond static tables and figures. We demonstrate the usefulness of interactive evidence maps using data from a published scoping review of pedagogical agents in K-12 education, and compare the results of the evidence map to those reported in the scoping review. Results show that interactive evidence maps complement traditional syntheses by enhancing transparency, supporting exploratory analysis, and revealing patterns and gaps that may not be easy to detect through narrative summaries alone.

Chris Davis Jaldi, Eleni Ilkou, Noah Schroeder et al.

Education is poised for a transformative shift with the advent of neurosymbolic artificial intelligence (NAI), which will redefine how we support deeply adaptive and personalized learning experiences. NAI-powered education systems will be capable of interpreting complex human concepts and contexts while employing advanced problem-solving strategies, all grounded in established pedagogical frameworks. This will enable a level of personalization in learning systems that to date has been largely unattainable at scale, providing finely tailored curricula that adapt to an individual's learning pace and accessibility needs, including the diagnosis of student understanding of subjects at a fine-grained level, identifying gaps in foundational knowledge, and adjusting instruction accordingly. In this paper, we propose a system that leverages the unique affordances of pedagogical agents -- embodied characters designed to enhance learning -- as critical components of a hybrid NAI architecture. To do so, these agents can thus simulate nuanced discussions, debates, and problem-solving exercises that push learners beyond rote memorization toward deep comprehension. We discuss the rationale for our system design and the preliminary findings of our work. We conclude that education in the era of NAI will make learning more accessible, equitable, and aligned with real-world skills. This is an era that will explore a new depth of understanding in educational tools.