An Empirical Benchmark of Small and Large Language Models for Extractive and Generative Question Answering with a Novel Confidence-Gated Hybrid Pipeline
The rapid proliferation of transformer-based language models has produced two distinct deployment paradigms: Small Language Models (SLMs) optimized for computational efficiency, and Large Language Models (LLMs) designed for broad generalization. This paper presents a comprehensive empirical benchmark of four SLMs BERT-...