Temporal Text Classification with Large Language Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Raihan, Nishat, Zampieri, Marcos
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Raihan, Nishat
Zampieri, Marcos
author_facet Raihan, Nishat
Zampieri, Marcos
contents Languages change over time. Computational models can be trained to recognize such changes enabling them to estimate the publication date of texts. Despite recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs), their performance on automatic dating of texts, also known as Temporal Text Classification (TTC), has not been explored. This study provides the first systematic evaluation of leading proprietary (Claude 3.5, GPT-4o, Gemini 1.5) and open-source (LLaMA 3.2, Gemma 2, Mistral, Nemotron 4) LLMs on TTC using three historical corpora, two in English and one in Portuguese. We test zero-shot and few-shot prompting, and fine-tuning settings. Our results indicate that proprietary models perform well, especially with few-shot prompting. They also indicate that fine-tuning substantially improves open-source models but that they still fail to match the performance delivered by proprietary LLMs.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_11295
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Temporal Text Classification with Large Language Models
Raihan, Nishat
Zampieri, Marcos
Computation and Language
Languages change over time. Computational models can be trained to recognize such changes enabling them to estimate the publication date of texts. Despite recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs), their performance on automatic dating of texts, also known as Temporal Text Classification (TTC), has not been explored. This study provides the first systematic evaluation of leading proprietary (Claude 3.5, GPT-4o, Gemini 1.5) and open-source (LLaMA 3.2, Gemma 2, Mistral, Nemotron 4) LLMs on TTC using three historical corpora, two in English and one in Portuguese. We test zero-shot and few-shot prompting, and fine-tuning settings. Our results indicate that proprietary models perform well, especially with few-shot prompting. They also indicate that fine-tuning substantially improves open-source models but that they still fail to match the performance delivered by proprietary LLMs.
title Temporal Text Classification with Large Language Models
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.11295