Prompt Refinement or Fine-tuning? Best Practices for using LLMs in Computational Social Science Tasks

Anders Giovanni Møller; Luca Maria Aiello

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arXiv · 2408.01346

Prompt Refinement or Fine-tuning? Best Practices for using LLMs in Computational Social Science Tasks

Anders Giovanni Møller·Luca Maria Aiello

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Abstract

Large Language Models are expressive tools that enable complex tasks of text understanding within Computational Social Science. Their versatility, while beneficial, poses a barrier for establishing standardized best practices within the field. To bring clarity on the values of different strategies, we present an overview of the performance of modern LLM-based classification methods on a benchmark of 23 social knowledge tasks. Our results point to three best practices: select models with larger vocabulary and pre-training corpora; avoid simple zero-shot in favor of AI-enhanced prompting; fine-tune on task-specific data, and consider more complex forms instruction-tuning on multiple datasets only when only training data is more abundant.

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Anders Giovanni Møller, Luca Maria Aiello. 2024-08-02. Prompt Refinement or Fine-tuning? Best Practices for using LLMs in Computational Social Science Tasks. https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.01346

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