# Prompting Encoder Models for Zero-Shot Classification: A Cross-Domain Study in Italian

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.20654 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.20654/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 28 of its 39 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 Jul 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 28 of 28)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [The Power of Scale for Parameter-Efficient Prompt Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08691/) (2021)
- [BioBERT: a pre-trained biomedical language representation model for biomedical text mining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.08746/) (2019)
- [SuperGLUE: A Stickier Benchmark for General-Purpose Language Understanding Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.00537/) (2019)
- [SciBERT: A Pretrained Language Model for Scientific Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.10676/) (2019)
- [Calibrate Before Use: Improving Few-Shot Performance of Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.09690/) (2021)
- [Making Pre-trained Language Models Better Few-shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15723/) (2020)
- [Fantastically Ordered Prompts and Where to Find Them: Overcoming Few-Shot Prompt Order Sensitivity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08786/) (2021)
- [ConceptNet 5.5: An Open Multilingual Graph of General Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03975/) (2016)
- [Domain-Specific Language Model Pretraining for Biomedical Natural Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.15779/) (2020)
- [Publicly Available Clinical BERT Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03323/) (2019)
- [Exploiting Cloze Questions for Few Shot Text Classification and Natural Language Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.07676/) (2020)
- [It's Not Just Size That Matters: Small Language Models Are Also Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.07118/) (2020)
- [Knowledgeable Prompt-tuning: Incorporating Knowledge into Prompt Verbalizer for Text Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.02035/) (2021)
- [LEGAL-BERT: The Muppets straight out of Law School](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02559/) (2020)
- [Automatically Identifying Words That Can Serve as Labels for Few-Shot Text Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.13641/) (2020)
- [Batch Calibration: Rethinking Calibration for In-Context Learning and Prompt Engineering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.17249/) (2023)
- [Mitigating Label Biases for In-context Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.19148/) (2023)
- [Legal Prompting: Teaching a Language Model to Think Like a Lawyer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.01326/) (2022)
- [Zero-shot Text Classification With Generative Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.10165/) (2019)
- [Legal Prompt Engineering for Multilingual Legal Judgement Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.02199/) (2022)
- [GPT-3 Models are Poor Few-Shot Learners in the Biomedical Domain](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.02555/) (2021)
- [Text Classification Using Label Names Only: A Language Model Self-Training Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.07245/) (2020)
- [HealthPrompt: A Zero-shot Learning Paradigm for Clinical Natural Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.05061/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Addressing the challenge of limited annotated data in specialized fields and low-resource languages is crucial for the effective use of Language Models (LMs). While most Large Language Models (LLMs) are trained on general-purpose English corpora, there is a notable gap in models specifically tailored for Italian, particularly for technical and bureaucratic jargon. This paper explores the feasibility of employing smaller, domain-specific encoder LMs alongside prompting techniques to enhance performance in these specialized contexts. Our study concentrates on the Italian bureaucratic and legal language, experimenting with both general-purpose and further pre-trained encoder-only models. We evaluated the models on downstream tasks such as document classification and entity typing and conducted intrinsic evaluations using Pseudo-Log-Likelihood. The results indicate that while further pre-trained models may show diminished robustness in general knowledge, they exhibit superior adaptability for domain-specific tasks, even in a zero-shot setting. Furthermore, the application of calibration techniques and in-domain verbalizers significantly enhances the efficacy of encoder models. These domain-specialized models prove to be particularly advantageous in scenarios where in-domain resources or expertise are scarce. In conclusion, our findings offer new insights into the use of Italian models in specialized contexts, which may have a significant impact on both research and industrial applications in the digital transformation era.