Paper 18: Small Generative Language Models for Educational Question Generation

The automatic generation of educational questions will play a key role in scaling online education, enabling self-assessment at scale when a global population is manoeuvring their personalised learning journeys. This work compares the predictive performance of foundational large-language model-based systems and their small-language model counterparts for educational question generation. Our experiments demonstrate that small language models can produce educational questions with comparable quality by further pre-training and fine-tuning while producing very lightweight models that can be easily trained, stored and deployed.