Academics Can Contribute to Domain-Specialized Language Models

Commercially available models dominate academic leaderboards. While impressive, this has concentrated research on creating and adapting general-purpose models to improve NLP leaderboard standings for large language models. However, leaderboards collect many individual tasks and general-purpose models often underperform in specialized domains; domainspecific or adapted models yield superior results. This focus on large general-purpose models excludes many academics and draws attention away from areas where they can make important contributions. We advocate for a renewed focus on developing and evaluating domain-and task-specific models, and highlight the unique role of academics in this endeavor.