Generative AI in Pragmatics: Assessing the Accuracy of Automated Speech Act Classification in Pinter’s <i>The Birthday Party</i>

This study explores the feasibility of using generative AI (ChatGPT, Gemini, and DeepSeek) to automate speech act annotation in Harold Pinter’s play The Birthday Party. Three chatbots – ChatGPT, Gemini, and DeepSeek – were tested under three scenarios varying in the amount of theoretical material provided. Each chatbot’s output was compared to a manually annotated reference via a Python script measuring classification accuracy. Scenario 2 produced the highest accuracy overall (75–82%), while Scenario 1 underperformed, owing to incorrect reliance on external typologies, and Scenario 3 showed signs of overfitting. ChatGPT o1 emerged as the most accurate model, achieving 82% accuracy in Scenario 2. The findings suggest that GenAI chatbots can serve as valuable preliminary annotators when good prompt-engineering and well-curated theoretical material are provided. Future research could extend this methodology to more context-dependent texts, further refining promptengineering strategies and exploring larger linguistic corpora.