SCRIBE: Structured Chain Reasoning for Interactive Behaviour Explanations using Tool Calling

ACL ARR 2025 May Submission5136 Authors

Abstract: Language models can be used to provide interactive, personalized student feedback in educational settings. However, real-world deployment faces three key challenges: privacy concerns, limited computational resources, and the need for pedagogically valid responses. These constraints require small, open-source models that can run locally and reliably ground their outputs in correct information. We introduce SCRIBE, a framework for multi-hop, tool-augmented reasoning designed to generate valid responses to student questions about feedback reports. SCRIBE combines domain-specific tools with a self-reflective inference pipeline that supports iterative reasoning, tool use, and error recovery. We distill these capabilities into 3B and 8B models via two-stage LoRA fine-tuning on synthetic GPT-4o-generated data. Evaluation using a human-aligned GPT-Judge and a user study with 108 students shows that SCRIBE matches or exceeds the perceived quality of much larger models, demonstrating its viability for low-resource, privacy-sensitive educational applications.

Paper Type: Long

Research Area: NLP Applications

Research Area Keywords: educational applications, human-centered evaluation, parameter-efficient-training

Contribution Types: NLP engineering experiment, Approaches to low-resource settings, Publicly available software and/or pre-trained models

Languages Studied: English

Submission Number: 5136