Few-Shot Learning for Text Classification and Its Applications in Essay Scoring and Software Engineering
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
<p>Few-shot learning—the ability to train models with access to limited data—has become increasingly popular in the natural language processing (NLP) domain, as large language models such as GPT and T0 have been empirically shown to achieve high performance in numerous tasks with access to just a handful of labeled examples. Smaller language models such as BERT and its variants have also been shown to achieve strong performance with just a handful of labeled examples when combined with few-shot learning algorithms like pattern-exploiting training (PET) and SetFit. The focus of this thesis is to investigate the performance of alternative few-shot learning approaches with BERT-based models. Specifically, vanilla fine-tuning, PET and SetFit are compared for numerous BERT-based checkpoints over an array of training set sizes. To facilitate this investigation, applications of few-shot learning are considered in automatic essay scoring—the task automatically grading written assessments—as well as in software engineering. For each task, high-performance techniques and their associated model checkpoints are identified through detailed empirical analysis. Our results establish PET as a strong few-shot learning approach, and our analysis show that with just a few hundred labeled examples it can achieve performance near that of fine-tuning on full-sized data sets.</p>
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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 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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