This case study investigates the task of job classification in a real-world setting, where the goal is to determine whether an English-language job posting is appropriate for a graduate or entry-level position. We explore multiple approaches to text classification, including supervised approaches such as traditional models like Support Vector Machines (SVMs) and state-of-the-art deep learning methods such as DeBERTa. We compare them with Large Language Models (LLMs) used in both few-shot and zero-shot classification settings. To accomplish this task, we employ prompt engineering, a technique that involves designing prompts to guide the LLMs towards the desired output. Specifically, we evaluate the performance of two commercially available state-of-the-art GPT-3.5-based language models, text-davinci-003 and gpt-3.5-turbo. We also conduct a detailed analysis of the impact of different aspects of prompt engineering on the model's performance. Our results show that, with a well-designed prompt, a zero-shot gpt-3.5-turbo classifier outperforms all other models, achieving a 6% increase in Precision@95% Recall compared to the best supervised approach. Furthermore, we observe that the wording of the prompt is a critical factor in eliciting the appropriate "reasoning" in the model, and that seemingly minor aspects of the prompt significantly affect the model's performance.

翻译：本案例研究探讨了现实场景中的职位分类任务，目标在于判断英文职位描述是否适用于研究生或入门级岗位。我们探索了多种文本分类方法，包括传统监督方法（如支持向量机）和前沿深度学习方法（如DeBERTa），并将其与基于大语言模型的少样本和零样本分类方法进行对比。为完成此任务，我们采用了提示工程技术，即设计提示以引导大语言模型产生预期输出。具体而言，我们评估了两种商用前沿GPT-3.5语言模型（text-davinci-003与gpt-3.5-turbo）的性能，并详细分析了提示工程不同维度对模型性能的影响。实验结果表明，在精心设计的提示下，零样本gpt-3.5-turbo分类器性能优于所有其他模型：在95%召回率条件下，其精确率相比最优监督方法提升6%。此外，我们观察到提示措辞是激发模型产生恰当"推理"的关键因素，且看似细微的提示特征会显著影响模型性能。