2025.emnlp-industry.48@ACL

Total: 1

#1 Controllable Clustering with LLM-driven Embeddings [PDF1] [Copy] [Kimi1] [REL]

Authors: Kerria Pang-Naylor, Shivani Manivasagan, Aitong Zhong, Mehak Garg, Nicholas Mondello, Blake Buckner, Jonathan P. Chang, Khyati Mahajan, Masoud Hashemi, Fabio Casati

Given the inherent subjectivity of similarity in text, fully unsupervised text clustering is unlikely to produce groupings that work across a variety of use cases. Traditional techniques to guide clustering rely on costly, time-consuming human feedback and/or pre-existing labels. Leveraging recent advancements in LLMs and decoder-only embedding models, we present techniques to effectively control text embeddings with minimal human input: prefix instructions and LLM preprocessing. We evaluate clustering performance for datasets with multiple independent ground-truth labels, or perspectives, and find that these techniques can be used to improve clustering for one perspective or use case, at the cost of a tradeoff in performance for another use case.

Subject: EMNLP.2025 - Industry Track