ACL 2025 - Vienna

Simon Münker

research
published and presented:

Simon Münker, Achim Rettinger, Damian Trilling

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

Proceedings of Student Research Workshop at the Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL)

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.

Main Hall of the Convention Center for ACL 2025 near the UN headquarters in Vienna

My first time at a major ACL venue. A gigantic convention center near the UN headquarters. ACL feels like something important. However, questions emerged about whether academic researchers are becoming “corporate drones” and whether industry is steering ACL research directions. Eduard Hovy, one of ACL’s founders, heavily criticized this trend and the publication of “LLM junk papers”: research that naively applies LLMs to demonstrate capabilities. Is what we are doing actually worth it?

Club lighting is directly reflected in the lens of the Albertina Museum’s after-party at the O-Club

Outside the conference, I explored Vienna and visited the Albertina Museum. A nice contrast to spending most of the day surrounded by papers, posters, and talks. Surprisingly, they had an after-party, which I joined at the O-Club. A completely different kind of conference experience than I envisioned.

High-rise residential building with a modern black-and-white mural behind a traditional Japanese lantern

At a ramen spot in a gentrifying quarter, a long queue stretched along the sidewalk. Naturally, we stood patiently in line, unwilling to settle for the second-best ramen restaurant in town.

Modern high-rise buildings for communal living with tinted balconies overlooking shared gardens in Vienna

Modern high-rises with tinted balconies overlook communal gardens and open walking paths where residents grow their own plants.