A Comparative Study of Prompting Strategies for Legal Text Classification
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this study, we explore the performance oflarge language models (LLMs) using differ-ent prompt engineering approaches in the con-text of legal text classification. Prior researchhas demonstrated that various prompting tech-niques can improve the performance of a di-verse array of tasks done by LLMs. However,in this research, we observe that professionaldocuments, and in particular legal documents,pose unique challenges for LLMs. We experi-ment with several LLMs and various promptingtechniques, including zero/few-shot prompting,prompt ensembling, chain-of-thought, and ac-tivation fine-tuning and compare the perfor-mance on legal datasets. Although the newgeneration of LLMs and prompt optimizationtechniques have been shown to improve gener-ation and understanding of generic tasks, ourfindings suggest that such improvements maynot readily transfer to other domains. Specifi-cally, experiments indicate that not all prompt-ing approaches and models are well-suited forthe legal domain which involves complexitiessuch as long documents and domain-specificlanguage.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".