Extracting sensory information from text, particularly olfactory references, is challenging due to limited annotated datasets and the implicit, subjective nature of sensory experiences. This study investigates whether GPT-4o-generated data can complement or replace human annotations. We evaluate human- and LLM-labeled corpora on two tasks: coarse-grained detection of olfactory content and fine-grained sensory term extraction. Despite lexical variation, generated texts align well with real data in semantic and sensorimotor embedding spaces. Models trained on synthetic data perform strongly, especially in low-resource settings. Human annotations offer better recall by capturing implicit and diverse aspects of sensoriality, while GPT-4o annotations show higher precision through clearer pattern alignment. Data augmentation experiments confirm the utility of synthetic data, though trade-offs remain between label consistency and lexical diversity. These findings support using synthetic data to enhance sensory information mining when annotated data is limited.

The five human senses – vision, taste, smell, hearing, and touch – are key concepts that shape human perception of the world. The extraction of sensory references (i.e., expressions that evoke the presence of a sensory experience) in textual corpus is a challenge of high interest, with many applications in various areas. In this paper, we propose SENSE-LM, an information extraction system tailored for the discovery of sensory references in large collections of textual documents. Based on the novel idea of combining the strength of large language models and linguistic resources such as sensorimotor norms, it addresses the task of sensory information extraction at a coarse-grained (sentence binary classification) and fine-grained (sensory term extraction) level.Our evaluation of SENSE-LM for two sensory functions, Olfaction and Audition, and comparison with state-of-the-art methods emphasize a significant leap forward in automating these complex tasks.