@inproceedings{arana-etal-2026-pathbuilder,
    title = "{P}ath{B}uilder: A Quality-Controlled {LLM} System for Personalized Learning Pathways",
    author = "Arana, Jasper Meynard  and
      Ma{\~n}acop, John Andrew  and
      Manacop, John Allen  and
      Garcia, Roy Andrew  and
      Piniera, Keith Rick  and
      Carandang, Kristine Ann M.  and
      Casin, Ethan Robert  and
      Alis, Christian  and
      Monterola, Christopher",
    editor = "Durrett, Greg  and
      Jian, Ping",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics (Volume 3: System Demonstrations)",
    month = jul,
    year = "2026",
    address = "San Diego, California, United States",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.acl-demo.50/",
    pages = "504--514",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-392-0",
    abstract = "Large language models (LLMs) enable scalable content generation for personalized learning, but reliability and pedagogical alignment remain open challenges. We present PathBuilder, a web-based system that integrates expert-validated assessment, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and an LLM-as-a-Judge validation loop within a closed instructional pipeline. The system uses a 17,758-item curriculum-aligned question bank, including 1,018 expert-approved LLM-generated items, to construct diagnostic and post-tests for fine-grained learner profiling. In a real-world deployment with 179 registered users (75 matched learners), PathBuilder achieved a mean absolute gain of 37.9 percentage points, Hake{'}s normalized gain of 0.760, and a large effect size (Cohen{'}s d = 0.98). A controlled study of the judge mechanism showed consistent high-quality instructional outputs with a 100{\%} threshold pass rate. These results demonstrate that structured curriculum alignment combined with retrieval grounding and automated validation can support reliable LLM-based personalization in deployed learning systems. A live demonstration of PathBuilder is available at https://demo.pathbuilderedu.com."
}