Topic Classification for Political Texts with Pretrained Language Models

Abstract Supervised topic classification requires labeled data. This often becomes a bottleneck as high-quality labeled data are expensive to acquire. To overcome the data scarcity problem, scholars have recently proposed to use cross-domain topic classification to take advantage of preexisting labeled datasets. Cross-domain topic classification only requires limited annotation in the target domain to verify its cross-domain accuracy. In this letter, we propose supervised topic classification with pretrained language models as an alternative. We show that language models fine-tuned with 70% of the small annotated dataset in the target corpus could outperform models trained using large cross-domain datasets by 27% and that models fine-tuned with 10% of the annotated dataset could already outperform the cross-domain classifiers. Our models are competitive in terms of training time and inference time. Researchers interested in supervised learning with limited labeled data should find our results useful. Our code and data are publicly available.1