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.

In this paper, we leverage large language models (LLMs) to perform zero-shot text style transfer. We present a prompting method that we call augmented zero-shot learning, which frames style transfer as a sentence rewriting task and requires only a natural language instruction, without model fine-tuning or exemplars in the target style. Augmented zero-shot learning is simple and demonstrates promising results not just on standard style transfer tasks such as sentiment, but also on arbitrary transformations such as ‘make this melodramatic’ or ‘insert a metaphor.’

The task of inserting text into a specified position in a passage, known as fill in the blank (FitB), is useful for a variety of applications where writers interact with a natural language generation (NLG) system to craft text. While previous work has tackled this problem with models trained specifically to do fill in the blank, a more useful model is one that can effectively perform _both_ FitB and continuation tasks. In this work, we evaluate the feasibility of using a single model to do both tasks. We show that models pre-trained with a FitB-style objective are capable of both tasks, while models pre-trained for continuation are not. Finally, we show how these models can be easily finetuned to allow for fine-grained control over the length and word choice of the generation.

We present the Language Interpretability Tool (LIT), an open-source platform for visualization and understanding of NLP models. We focus on core questions about model behavior: Why did my model make this prediction? When does it perform poorly? What happens under a controlled change in the input? LIT integrates local explanations, aggregate analysis, and counterfactual generation into a streamlined, browser-based interface to enable rapid exploration and error analysis. We include case studies for a diverse set of workflows, including exploring counterfactuals for sentiment analysis, measuring gender bias in coreference systems, and exploring local behavior in text generation. LIT supports a wide range of models—including classification, seq2seq, and structured prediction—and is highly extensible through a declarative, framework-agnostic API. LIT is under active development, with code and full documentation available at https://github.com/pair-code/lit.