International audience

International audience

International audience

We present a new question answering corpus in French designed to educational domain. To be useful in such domain, we have to propose more complex questions and to be able to justify the answers on validated material. We analyze some properties of this corpus. The last part of this paper will be devoted to present the first experiments we have carried out to demonstrate the value of this dataset for learning a Retrieval Augmented Genration framework. Different experiments are proposed, with an automatic evaluation. A human evaluation is proposed to confirm or infirm this automatic evaluation.

This study is part of the debate on the efficiency of large versus small language models for text classification by prompting. We assess the performance of small language models in zero-shot text classification, challenging the prevailing dominance of large models. Across 15 datasets, our investigation benchmarks language models from 77M to 40B parameters using different architectures and scoring functions. Our findings reveal that small models can effectively classify texts, getting on par with or surpassing their larger counterparts. We developed and shared a comprehensive open-source repository that encapsulates our methodologies. This research underscores the notion that bigger isn’t always better, suggesting that resource-efficient small models may offer viable solutions for specific data classification challenges.