In the realm of Computational Social Science (CSS), practitioners often navigate complex, low-resource domains and face the costly and time-intensive challenges of acquiring and annotating data. We aim to establish a set of guidelines to address such challenges, comparing the use of human-labeled data with synthetically generated data from GPT-4 and Llama-2 in ten distinct CSS classification tasks of varying complexity. Additionally, we examine the impact of training data sizes on performance. Our findings reveal that models trained on human-labeled data consistently exhibit superior or comparable performance compared to their synthetically augmented counterparts. Nevertheless, synthetic augmentation proves beneficial, particularly in improving performance on rare classes within multi-class tasks. Furthermore, we leverage GPT-4 and Llama-2 for zero-shot classification and find that, while they generally display strong performance, they often fall short when compared to specialized classifiers trained on moderately sized training sets.

With the COVID-19 pandemic raging world-wide since the beginning of the 2020 decade, the need for monitoring systems to track relevant information on social media is vitally important. This paper describes our submission to the WNUT-2020 Task 2: Identification of informative COVID-19 English Tweets. We investigate the effectiveness for a variety of classification models, and found that domain-specific pre-trained BERT models lead to the best performance. On top of this, we attempt a variety of ensembling strategies, but these attempts did not lead to further improvements. Our final best model, the standalone CT-BERT model, proved to be highly competitive, leading to a shared first place in the shared task. Our results emphasize the importance of domain and task-related pre-training.