@inproceedings{raihan-zampieri-2026-temporal,
    title = "Temporal Text Classification with Large Language Models",
    author = "Raihan, Nishat  and
      Zampieri, Marcos",
    editor = {Hamilton, Sil  and
      {\"O}hman, Emily  and
      Hicke, Rebecca M. M.  and
      Bizzoni, Yuri  and
      Bax, Axel  and
      Matthews, Jacob A.  and
      H{\"a}m{\"a}l{\"a}inen, Mika},
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Natural Language Processing for the Digital Humanities",
    month = jul,
    year = "2026",
    address = "San Diego, USA",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl-workshops/2026.nlp4dh-1.10/",
    pages = "96--105",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-427-9",
    abstract = "Languages change over time. Computational models can be trained to recognize such changes enabling them to estimate the publication date of texts. Despite recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs), their performance on automatic dating of texts, also known as Temporal Text Classification (TTC), has not been explored. This study provides the first systematic evaluation of leading proprietary (Claude 3.5, GPT-4o, Gemini 1.5) and open-source (LLaMA 3.2, Gemma 2, Mistral, Nemotron 4) LLMs on TTC using three historical corpora, two in English and one in Portuguese. We test zero-shot and few-shot prompting, and fine-tuning settings. Our results indicate that proprietary models perform well, especially with few-shot prompting. They also indicate that fine-tuning substantially improves open-source models but that they still fail to match the performance delivered by proprietary LLMs."
}