Large-Scale Text Analysis Using Generative Language Models: A Case Study in Discovering Public Value Expressions in AI Patents

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates how GPT-4 can be used to generate labels and rationales for large-scale text analysis of AI patents, effectively identifying public value expressions with high accuracy and efficiency.

Contribution

It introduces a novel framework leveraging GPT-4 for label and rationale generation in large-scale patent text analysis, improving accuracy and reducing costs.

Findings

GPT-4 produces accurate, diverse, and faithful labels and rationales.

The approach enables high F1 scores in classifying public value expressions.

Using GPT-4 labels to train classifiers yields high predictive performance.

Abstract

Labeling data is essential for training text classifiers but is often difficult to accomplish accurately, especially for complex and abstract concepts. Seeking an improved method, this paper employs a novel approach using a generative language model (GPT-4) to produce labels and rationales for large-scale text analysis. We apply this approach to the task of discovering public value expressions in US AI patents. We collect a database comprising 154,934 patent documents using an advanced Boolean query submitted to InnovationQ+. The results are merged with full patent text from the USPTO, resulting in 5.4 million sentences. We design a framework for identifying and labeling public value expressions in these AI patent sentences. A prompt for GPT-4 is developed which includes definitions, guidelines, examples, and rationales for text classification. We evaluate the quality of the labels and rationales produced by GPT-4 using BLEU scores and topic modeling and find that they are accurate, diverse, and faithful. These rationales also serve as a chain-of-thought for the model, a transparent mechanism for human verification, and support for human annotators to overcome cognitive limitations. We conclude that GPT-4 achieved a high-level of recognition of public value theory from our framework, which it also uses to discover unseen public value expressions. We use the labels produced by GPT-4 to train BERT-based classifiers and predict sentences on the entire database, achieving high F1 scores for the 3-class (0.85) and 2-class classification (0.91) tasks. We discuss the implications of our approach for conducting large-scale text analyses with complex and abstract concepts and suggest that, with careful framework design and interactive human oversight, generative language models can offer significant advantages in quality and in reduced time and costs for producing labels and rationales.