Exploring the potential of using ChatGPT for rhetorical move-step analysis: The impact of prompt refinement, few-shot learning, and fine-tuning

Rhetorical move-step analysis has wielded considerable influence in the fields of English for Academic/Specific Purposes. To explore the potential of using ChatGPT for automated move-step analysis, this study examines the impact of few-shot learning, prompt refinement, and base model fine-tuning on its accuracy in move-step annotation. Our dataset consisted of the introduction sections of 100 research articles in the field of applied linguistics that have been manually annotated for move-steps based on a modified version of Swales’ (1990) Create-a-Research-Space model, with 80 for training, 10 for validation, and 10 for testing. We formulated an initial prompt that instructed the base model to perform move-step annotation, evaluated it in a zero-shot setting on the validation set, and subsequently refined it with greater specificity. We also fine-tuned the base model on the training set. Evaluation results on the test set showed that few-shot learning and prompt refinement both led to significant albeit relatively small performance improvements, while fine-tuning the base model achieved substantially higher accuracies (92.3% for move and 80.2% for step annotation). Our results highlight the potential of using ChatGPT for discourse-level annotation tasks and have useful implications for EAP pedagogy. They also provide key recommendations for employing ChatGPT in research.