Knowledge Distillation in Automated Annotation: Supervised Text Classification with LLM-Generated Training Labels

Nicholas Pangakis, Sam Wolken


Abstract
Computational social science (CSS) practitioners often rely on human-labeled data to fine-tune supervised text classifiers. We assess the potential for researchers to augment or replace human-generated training data with surrogate training labels from generative large language models (LLMs). We introduce a recommended workflow and test this LLM application by replicating 14 classification tasks and measuring performance. We employ a novel corpus of English-language text classification data sets from recent CSS articles in high-impact journals. Because these data sets are stored in password-protected archives, our analyses are less prone to issues of contamination. For each task, we compare supervised classifiers fine-tuned using GPT-4 labels against classifiers fine-tuned with human annotations and against labels from GPT-4 and Mistral-7B with few-shot in-context learning. Our findings indicate that supervised classification models fine-tuned on LLM-generated labels perform comparably to models fine-tuned with labels from human annotators. Fine-tuning models using LLM-generated labels can be a fast, efficient and cost-effective method of building supervised text classifiers.
Anthology ID:
2024.nlpcss-1.9
Volume:
Proceedings of the Sixth Workshop on Natural Language Processing and Computational Social Science (NLP+CSS 2024)
Month:
June
Year:
2024
Address:
Mexico City, Mexico
Editors:
Dallas Card, Anjalie Field, Dirk Hovy, Katherine Keith
Venues:
NLP+CSS | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
113–131
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.nlpcss-1.9
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.nlpcss-1.9
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Nicholas Pangakis and Sam Wolken. 2024. Knowledge Distillation in Automated Annotation: Supervised Text Classification with LLM-Generated Training Labels. In Proceedings of the Sixth Workshop on Natural Language Processing and Computational Social Science (NLP+CSS 2024), pages 113–131, Mexico City, Mexico. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Knowledge Distillation in Automated Annotation: Supervised Text Classification with LLM-Generated Training Labels (Pangakis & Wolken, NLP+CSS-WS 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.nlpcss-1.9.pdf