Towards Human-Like Educational Question Generation with Small Language Models

Fares Fawzi, Sarang Balan, Mutlu Cukurova, Emine Yilmaz, Sahan Bulathwela

Abstract: With the advent of Generative AI models, the automatic generation of educational questions plays a key role in developing online education. This work compares large-language model-based (LLM) systems and their small-language model (sLM) counterparts for educational question generation. Our experiments, quantitatively and qualitatively, demonstrate that sLMs can produce educational questions with comparable quality by further pre-training and fine-tuning.