Span Labeling with Large Language Models: Shell vs. Meat

We present a method for labeling spans of text with large language models (LLMs) and apply it to the task of identifying shell language, language which plays a structural or connective role without constituting the main content of a text.We compare several recent LLMs by evaluating their "annotations" against a small human-curated test set, and train a smaller supervised model on thousands of LLM-annotated examples.The described method enables workflows that can learn complex or nuanced linguistic phenomena without tedious, large-scale hand-annotations of training data or specialized feature engineering.