Text Classification

Text classification is the gateway drug of NLP — sentiment analysis, spam detection, topic labeling — and the task where transformers first proved their dominance over LSTMs. BERT (2018) set the template, but the real revolution came when instruction-tuned LLMs like GPT-4 and Llama 3 started matching fine-tuned classifiers zero-shot, threatening to make task-specific training obsolete. SST-2, AG News, and IMDB remain standard benchmarks, though the field increasingly cares about multilingual and low-resource performance where English-centric models still stumble. The open question: does a 70B parameter model doing classification via prompting actually beat a 100M fine-tuned encoder when you factor in latency and cost?