ChatGPT Outperforms Crowd-Workers for Text-Annotation Tasks

Published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2305016120 Many NLP applications require manual text annotations for a variety of tasks, notably to train classifiers or evaluate the performance of unsupervised models. Depending on the size and degree of complexity, the tasks may be conducted by crowd-workers on platforms such as MTurk as well as trained annotators, such as research assistants. Using four samples of tweets and news articles (n = 6,183), we show that ChatGPT outperforms crowd-workers for several annotation tasks, including relevance, stance, topics, and frame detection. Across the four datasets, the zero-shot accuracy of ChatGPT exceeds that of crowd-workers by about 25 percentage points on average, while ChatGPT's intercoder agreement exceeds that of both crowd-workers and trained annotators for all tasks. Moreover, the per-annotation cost of ChatGPT is less than $0.003--about thirty times cheaper than MTurk. These results demonstrate the potential of large language models to drastically increase the efficiency of text classification. 1 Introduction Many NLP applications require high-quality labeled data, notably to train classifiers or evaluate the performance of unsupervised models. For example, researchers often aim to filter noisy social media data for relevance, assign texts to different topics or conceptual categories, or measure their sentiment or stance.