LLM-as-an-Annotator: Training Lightweight Models with LLM-Annotated Examples for Aspect Sentiment Tuple Prediction

Nils Constantin Hellwig, Jakob Fehle, Udo Kruschwitz, Christian Wolff


Abstract
Training models for Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) tasks requires manually annotated data, which is expensive and time-consuming to obtain. This paper introduces LA-ABSA, a novel approach that leverages Large Language Model (LLM)-generated annotations to fine-tune lightweight models for complex ABSA tasks. We evaluate our approach on five datasets for Target Aspect Sentiment Detection (TASD) and Aspect Sentiment Quad Prediction (ASQP). Our approach outperformed previously reported augmentation strategies and achieved competitive performance with LLM-prompting in low-resource scenarios, while providing substantial energy efficiency benefits. For example, using 50 annotated examples for in-context learning (ICL) to guide the annotation of unlabeled data, LA-ABSA achieved an F1 score of 49.85 for ASQP on the SemEval Rest16 dataset, closely matching the performance of ICL prompting with Gemma-3-27B (51.10), while requiring significantly lower computational resources.
Anthology ID:
2026.lrec-main.632
Volume:
Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
May
Year:
2026
Address:
Palma de Mallorca, Spain
Editors:
Stelios Piperidis, Núria Bel, Henk van den Heuvel, Nancy Ide, Simon Krek, Antonio Toral
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA Language Resource Association
Note:
Pages:
7955–7972
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-lrec/2026.lrec-main.632/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Nils Constantin Hellwig, Jakob Fehle, Udo Kruschwitz, and Christian Wolff. 2026. LLM-as-an-Annotator: Training Lightweight Models with LLM-Annotated Examples for Aspect Sentiment Tuple Prediction. International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, main:7955–7972.
Cite (Informal):
LLM-as-an-Annotator: Training Lightweight Models with LLM-Annotated Examples for Aspect Sentiment Tuple Prediction (Hellwig et al., LREC 2026)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-lrec/2026.lrec-main.632.pdf