# Evaluating LLM Prompts for Data Augmentation in Multi-label Classification of Ecological Texts

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.14896 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.14896/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 15 of its 31 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Nov 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 15 of 15)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [BERTScore: Evaluating Text Generation with BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09675/) (2019)
- [EDA: Easy Data Augmentation Techniques for Boosting Performance on Text Classification Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.11196/) (2019)
- [Improving Neural Machine Translation Models with Monolingual Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.06709/) (2015)
- [GPT3Mix: Leveraging Large-scale Language Models for Text Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08826/) (2021)
- [Data Augmentation using Pre-trained Transformer Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.02245/) (2020)
- [AugGPT: Leveraging ChatGPT for Text Data Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13007/) (2023)
- [Adaptation of Deep Bidirectional Multilingual Transformers for Russian Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.07213/) (2019)
- [Conditional BERT Contextual Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.06705/) (2018)
- [An Empirical Survey of Data Augmentation for Limited Data Learning in NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.07499/) (2021)
- [AEDA: An Easier Data Augmentation Technique for Text Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.13230/) (2021)
- [The Parrot Dilemma: Human-Labeled vs. LLM-augmented Data in Classification Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.13861/) (2023)
- [A Family of Pretrained Transformer Language Models for Russian](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.10931/) (2023)
- [Medical Data Augmentation via ChatGPT: A Case Study on Medication Identification and Medication Event Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.07297/) (2023)
- [From Big to Small Without Losing It All: Text Augmentation with ChatGPT for Efficient Sentiment Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.04720/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Synthetic Data Augmentation for Enhancing Harmful Algal Bloom Detection with Machine Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.03794/) (2025)
- [Using Artificial Intuition in Distinct, Minimalist Classification of Scientific Abstracts for Management of Technology Portfolios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.13182/) (2025)
- [When Does Synthetic Patent Data Help? Volume-Fidelity Trade-offs in Low-Resource Multi-Label Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.24296/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Large language models (LLMs) play a crucial role in natural language processing (NLP) tasks, improving the understanding, generation, and manipulation of human language across domains such as translating, summarizing, and classifying text. Previous studies have demonstrated that instruction-based LLMs can be effectively utilized for data augmentation to generate diverse and realistic text samples. This study applied prompt-based data augmentation to detect mentions of green practices in Russian social media. Detecting green practices in social media aids in understanding their prevalence and helps formulate recommendations for scaling eco-friendly actions to mitigate environmental issues. We evaluated several prompts for augmenting texts in a multi-label classification task, either by rewriting existing datasets using LLMs, generating new data, or combining both approaches. Our results revealed that all strategies improved classification performance compared to the models fine-tuned only on the original dataset, outperforming baselines in most cases. The best results were obtained with the prompt that paraphrased the original text while clearly indicating the relevant categories.