Evaluating LLM-Prompting for Sequence Labeling Tasks in Computational Literary Studies

Axel Pichler, Janis Pagel, Nils Reiter


Abstract
Prompt engineering holds the promise for the computational literary studies (CLS) to obtain high quality markup for literary research questions by simply prompting large language models with natural language strings. We test prompt engineering’s validity for two CLS sequence labeling tasks under the following aspects: (i) how generalizable are the results of identical prompts on different dataset splits?, (ii) how robust are performance results when re-formulating the prompts?, and (iii) how generalizable are certain fixed phrases added to the prompts that are generally considered to increase performance. We find that results are sensitive to data splits and prompt formulation, while the addition of fixed phrases does not change performance in most cases, depending on the chosen model.
Anthology ID:
2025.latechclfl-1.5
Volume:
Proceedings of the 9th Joint SIGHUM Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, Humanities and Literature (LaTeCH-CLfL 2025)
Month:
May
Year:
2025
Address:
Albuquerque, New Mexico
Editors:
Anna Kazantseva, Stan Szpakowicz, Stefania Degaetano-Ortlieb, Yuri Bizzoni, Janis Pagel
Venues:
LaTeCHCLfL | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
32–46
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/landing_page/2025.latechclfl-1.5/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Axel Pichler, Janis Pagel, and Nils Reiter. 2025. Evaluating LLM-Prompting for Sequence Labeling Tasks in Computational Literary Studies. In Proceedings of the 9th Joint SIGHUM Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, Humanities and Literature (LaTeCH-CLfL 2025), pages 32–46, Albuquerque, New Mexico. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Evaluating LLM-Prompting for Sequence Labeling Tasks in Computational Literary Studies (Pichler et al., LaTeCHCLfL 2025)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/landing_page/2025.latechclfl-1.5.pdf