Opportunities and Challenges of LLMs in Education: An NLP Perspective

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.