Zero-shot prompt-based classification: topic labeling in times of foundation models in German Tweets

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Hauptverfasser: Münker, Simon, Kugler, Kai, Rettinger, Achim
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2024
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author Münker, Simon
Kugler, Kai
Rettinger, Achim
author_facet Münker, Simon
Kugler, Kai
Rettinger, Achim
contents Filtering and annotating textual data are routine tasks in many areas, like social media or news analytics. Automating these tasks allows to scale the analyses wrt. speed and breadth of content covered and decreases the manual effort required. Due to technical advancements in Natural Language Processing, specifically the success of large foundation models, a new tool for automating such annotation processes by using a text-to-text interface given written guidelines without providing training samples has become available. In this work, we assess these advancements in-the-wild by empirically testing them in an annotation task on German Twitter data about social and political European crises. We compare the prompt-based results with our human annotation and preceding classification approaches, including Naive Bayes and a BERT-based fine-tuning/domain adaptation pipeline. Our results show that the prompt-based approach - despite being limited by local computation resources during the model selection - is comparable with the fine-tuned BERT but without any annotated training data. Our findings emphasize the ongoing paradigm shift in the NLP landscape, i.e., the unification of downstream tasks and elimination of the need for pre-labeled training data.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2406_18239
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Zero-shot prompt-based classification: topic labeling in times of foundation models in German Tweets
Münker, Simon
Kugler, Kai
Rettinger, Achim
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Filtering and annotating textual data are routine tasks in many areas, like social media or news analytics. Automating these tasks allows to scale the analyses wrt. speed and breadth of content covered and decreases the manual effort required. Due to technical advancements in Natural Language Processing, specifically the success of large foundation models, a new tool for automating such annotation processes by using a text-to-text interface given written guidelines without providing training samples has become available. In this work, we assess these advancements in-the-wild by empirically testing them in an annotation task on German Twitter data about social and political European crises. We compare the prompt-based results with our human annotation and preceding classification approaches, including Naive Bayes and a BERT-based fine-tuning/domain adaptation pipeline. Our results show that the prompt-based approach - despite being limited by local computation resources during the model selection - is comparable with the fine-tuned BERT but without any annotated training data. Our findings emphasize the ongoing paradigm shift in the NLP landscape, i.e., the unification of downstream tasks and elimination of the need for pre-labeled training data.
title Zero-shot prompt-based classification: topic labeling in times of foundation models in German Tweets
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.18239