Towards Agile Text Classifiers for Everyone

Maximilian Mozes, Jessica Hoffmann, Katrin Tomanek, Muhamed Kouate, Nithum Thain, Ann Yuan, Tolga Bolukbasi, Lucas Dixon


Abstract
Text-based safety classifiers are widely used for content moderation and increasingly to tune generative language model behavior - a topic of growing concern for the safety of digital assistants and chatbots. However, different policies require different classifiers, and safety policies themselves improve from iteration and adaptation. This paper introduces and evaluates methods for agile text classification, whereby classifiers are trained using small, targeted datasets that can be quickly developed for a particular policy. Experimenting with 7 datasets from three safety-related domains, comprising 15 annotation schemes, led to our key finding: prompt-tuning large language models, like PaLM 62B, with a labeled dataset of as few as 80 examples can achieve state-of-the-art performance. We argue that this enables a paradigm shift for text classification, especially for models supporting safer online discourse. Instead of collecting millions of examples to attempt to create universal safety classifiers over months or years, classifiers could be tuned using small datasets, created by individuals or small organizations, tailored for specific use cases, and iterated on and adapted in the time-span of a day.
Anthology ID:
2023.findings-emnlp.30
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
400–414
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.30
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.findings-emnlp.30
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Maximilian Mozes, Jessica Hoffmann, Katrin Tomanek, Muhamed Kouate, Nithum Thain, Ann Yuan, Tolga Bolukbasi, and Lucas Dixon. 2023. Towards Agile Text Classifiers for Everyone. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023, pages 400–414, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Towards Agile Text Classifiers for Everyone (Mozes et al., Findings 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.30.pdf