Automated Classification for Open-Ended Questions with BERT
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Manual coding of text data from open-ended questions into different categories is time consuming and expensive. Automated coding uses statistical/machine learning to train on a small subset of manually-coded text answers. Recently, pretraining a general language model on vast amounts of unrelated data and then adapting the model to the specific application has proven effective in natural language processing. Using two data sets, we empirically investigate whether BERT, the currently dominant pretrained language model, is more effective at automated coding of answers to open-ended questions than other non-pretrained statistical learning approaches. We found fine-tuning the pretrained BERT parameters is essential as otherwise BERT is not competitive. Second, we found fine-tuned BERT barely beats the non-pretrained statistical learning approaches in terms of classification accuracy when trained on 100 manually coded observations. However, BERT’s relative advantage increases rapidly when more manually coded observations (e.g., 200–400) are available for training. We conclude that for automatically coding answers to open-ended questions BERT is preferable to non-pretrained models such as support vector machines and boosting.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it