Opportunities and Challenges of LLMs in Education: An NLP Perspective

TL;DR

This paper explores how large language models can transform education through new opportunities and challenges in NLP applications like assistance and assessment across reading, writing, speaking, and tutoring.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of the potential and challenges of LLMs in educational NLP, highlighting new directions for future research and applications.

Findings

Identifies key opportunities for LLMs in educational NLP.

Discusses major challenges to integrating LLMs in education.

Outlines future research directions for NLP in education.

Abstract

Interest in the role of large language models (LLMs) in education is increasing, considering the new opportunities they offer for teaching, learning, and assessment. In this paper, we examine the impact of LLMs on educational NLP in the context of two main application scenarios: {\em assistance} and {\em assessment}, grounding them along the four dimensions -- reading, writing, speaking, and tutoring. We then present the new directions enabled by LLMs, and the key challenges to address. We envision that this holistic overview would be useful for NLP researchers and practitioners interested in exploring the role of LLMs in developing language-focused and NLP-enabled educational applications of the future.