Large language models (LLMs) have shown a remarkable ability to generalize beyond their pre-training data, and fine-tuning LLMs can elevate performance to human-level and beyond. However, in real-world scenarios, lacking labeled data often prevents practitioners from obtaining well-performing models, thereby forcing practitioners to highly rely on prompt-based approaches that are often tedious, inefficient, and driven by trial and error. To alleviate this issue of lacking labeled data, we present a learning framework integrating LLMs with active learning for unlabeled dataset (LAUD). LAUD mitigates the cold-start problem by constructing an initial label set with zero-shot learning. Experimental results show that LLMs derived from LAUD outperform LLMs with zero-shot or few-shot learning on commodity name classification tasks, demonstrating the effectiveness of LAUD.

Using prompts to utilize language models to perform various downstream tasks, also known as prompt-based learning or prompt-learning, has lately gained significant success in comparison to the pre-train and fine-tune paradigm. Nonetheless, virtually all prompt-based methods are token-level, meaning they all utilize GPT's left-to-right language model or BERT's masked language model to perform cloze-style tasks. In this paper, we attempt to accomplish several NLP tasks in the zero-shot scenario using a BERT original pre-training task abandoned by RoBERTa and other models--Next Sentence Prediction (NSP). Unlike token-level techniques, our sentence-level prompt-based method NSP-BERT does not need to fix the length of the prompt or the position to be predicted, allowing it to handle tasks such as entity linking with ease. Based on the characteristics of NSP-BERT, we offer several quick building templates for various downstream tasks. We suggest a two-stage prompt method for word sense disambiguation tasks in particular. Our strategies for mapping the labels significantly enhance the model's performance on sentence pair tasks. On the FewCLUE benchmark, our NSP-BERT outperforms other zero-shot methods on most of these tasks and comes close to the few-shot methods.