Uncovering the semantics of concepts using GPT-4

The ability of recent Large Language Models (LLMs) such as GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 to generate human-like texts suggests that social scientists could use these LLMs to construct measures of semantic similarity that match human judgment. In this article, we provide an empirical test of this intuition. We use GPT-4 to construct a measure of typicality-the similarity of a text document to a concept. We evaluate its performance against other model-based typicality measures in terms of the correlation with human typicality ratings. We conduct this comparative analysis in two domains: the typicality of books in literary genres (using an existing dataset of book descriptions) and the typicality of tweets authored by US Congress members in the Democratic and Republican parties (using a novel dataset). The typicality measure produced with GPT-4 meets or exceeds the performance of the previous state-of-the art typicality measure we introduced in a recent paper [G. Le Mens, B. Kovács, M. T. Hannan, G. Pros Rius, Sociol. Sci. 2023, 82-117 (2023)]. It accomplishes this without any training with the research data (it is zero-shot learning). This is a breakthrough because the previous state-of-the-art measure required fine-tuning an LLM on hundreds of thousands of text documents to achieve its performance.