Semi-automatic Sequential Sentence Classification in the Discourse Analysis Tool Suite

AbstractThis paper explores an AI-assisted approach to sequential sentence annotation designed to enhance qualitative data analysis (QDA) workflows within the open-source Discourse Analysis Tool Suite (DATS) developed at our university.We introduce a three-phase Annotation Assistant that leverages the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) to assist researchers during annotation.Based on the number of annotations, the assistant employs zero-shot prompting, few-shot prompting, or fine-tuned models to provide the best suggestions.To evaluate this approach, we construct a benchmark with five diverse datasets.We assess the performance of three prominent open-source LLMs — Llama 3.1, Gemma 2, and Mistral NeMo — and a sequence tagging model based on SentenceTransformers.Our findings demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, with performance improving as the number of annotated examples increases. Consequently, we implemented the Annotation Assistant within DATS and report the implementation details.With this, we hope to contribute to a novel AI-assisted workflow and further democratize access to AI for qualitative data analysis.