Can This LLM Annotate My Data? Estimating Zero-Shot LLM Performance

Tong Lin, Grant Schoenebeck, Sabina Tomkins

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in annotation tasks with varying success. While several studies have demonstrated the opportunities and shortcomings of LLMs for annotation, a critical question remains unanswered: is it possible to predict how well they will perform on a new dataset? To answer this and related questions, we construct two task families which induce 461 text classification datasets. We find that it is possible to predict LLM performance - to a certain degree - and that contrary to other work which highlights the usefulness of LLM verbalizations of self-confidence, internal log-probabilities are the most predictive signal.