Zero-shot narrative detection in social messaging

This study investigates the zero-shot ability of large language models (LLMs) to identify and classify hidden narratives in social messages. Our research hypothesis is that LLMs' extensive contextual knowledge allows them to interpret messages on a deeper, pragmatic level, going beyond basic sentiment or topic analysis. Experiments on the Dipromats and SemEval datasets show that providing models with human-written narrative descriptions significantly improves performance, without the need of training examples. In contrast, automatically generated descriptions or the use of few examples (few-shot) often degrade accuracy due to subtle shifts in framing. The study also finds that ensemble methods, particularly majority voting, enhance robustness and that larger models perform best while also being less sensitive to prompt variations. The findings validate that LLMs can effectively detect strategic narratives in a zero-shot setting, and when combined with simple ensembling and human-written descriptions, they can rival supervised systems, offering a scalable solution for narrative detection, specially when there is no training data for the vast majority of domains.