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  4. SCRIBE: Structured Chain Reasoning for Interactive Behaviour Explanations using Tool Calling
 
conference proceedings

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

Fawzi, Fares  
•
Swamy, Vinitra  
•
Glandorf, Dominik
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2025
Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

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 distil these capabilities into 3B and 8B models via two-stage LoRA fine-tuning on synthetic GPT-4o-generated data. Evaluation with a human-aligned GPT-Judge and a user study with 108 students shows that 8B-SCRIBE models achieve comparable or superior quality to much larger models in key dimensions such as relevance and actionability, while being perceived on par with GPT-4o and Llama-3.3 70B by students. These findings demonstrate the viability of SCRIBE for low-resource, privacy-sensitive educational applications.

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Type
conference proceedings
DOI
10.18653/v1/2025.emnlp-main.1490
Author(s)
Fawzi, Fares  

EPFL

Swamy, Vinitra  

EPFL

Glandorf, Dominik
Nazaretsky, Tatjana  

EPFL

Käser, Tanja  

EPFL

Date Issued

2025

Publisher

Association for Computational Linguistics

Editorial or Peer reviewed

REVIEWED

Written at

EPFL

EPFL units
ML4ED  
Event nameEvent acronymEvent placeEvent date
Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

EMNLP

Suzhou, China

2025-11-04

Available on Infoscience
November 20, 2025
Use this identifier to reference this record
https://infoscience.epfl.ch/handle/20.500.14299/256077
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