Automatic normalization of noisy technical reports with an LLM: What effects on a downstream task?

Mariame Maarouf, Ludovic Tanguy


Abstract
This study explores the automatic normalization of noisy and highly technical anomaly reports by an LLM. Different prompts are tested to instruct the LLM to clean the text without changing the structure, vocabulary or specialized lexicon. The evaluation of this task is made in two steps. First, the Character Error Rate (CER) is calculated to assess the changes made compared to a gold standard on a small sample. Second, an automatic sequence labeling task is performed on the original and on the corrected datasets with a transformer-based classifier. If some configurations of LLM and prompts can reach satisfying CER scores, the sequence labeling task shows that the normalization has a small negative impact on performance.
Anthology ID:
2025.wnut-1.5
Volume:
Proceedings of the Tenth Workshop on Noisy and User-generated Text
Month:
May
Year:
2025
Address:
Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA
Editors:
JinYeong Bak, Rob van der Goot, Hyeju Jang, Weerayut Buaphet, Alan Ramponi, Wei Xu, Alan Ritter
Venues:
WNUT | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
38–44
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/Ingest-2025-COMPUTEL/2025.wnut-1.5/
DOI:
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Cite (ACL):
Mariame Maarouf and Ludovic Tanguy. 2025. Automatic normalization of noisy technical reports with an LLM: What effects on a downstream task?. In Proceedings of the Tenth Workshop on Noisy and User-generated Text, pages 38–44, Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Automatic normalization of noisy technical reports with an LLM: What effects on a downstream task? (Maarouf & Tanguy, WNUT 2025)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/Ingest-2025-COMPUTEL/2025.wnut-1.5.pdf