A comparative analysis of encoder only and decoder only models in intent classification and sentiment analysis: navigating the trade-offs in model size and performance.

Intent classification and sentiment analysis stand as pivotal tasks in natural language understanding (NLU), with applications ranging from virtual assistants to customer service. The advent of transformer-based models has significantly enhanced the performance of various NLP tasks, with encoder-onl...

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Published in:Language Resources & Evaluation Vol. 59; no. 3; pp. 2007 - 2031
Main Authors: Benayas, Alberto, Sicilia, Miguel Angel, Mora-Cantallops, Marçal
Format: Article
Published: Springer Nature Sep2025
Subjects:
Online Access:View this record in EBSCOhost
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        atl: A comparative analysis of encoder only and decoder only models in intent classification and sentiment analysis: navigating the trade-offs in model size and performance.
      aug:
        au:
          Benayas, Alberto
          Sicilia, Miguel Angel
          Mora-Cantallops, Marçal
        affil: https://ror.org/04pmn0e78 Computer Science Department, University of Alcalá, Alcalá de Henares, Spain
      su:
        Sentiment analysis
        Transformer models
        Decoding algorithms
        Natural language processing
        Computer performance
        Computational linguistics
      sug:
        subj:
          Sentiment analysis
          Transformer models
          Decoding algorithms
          Natural language processing
          Computer performance
          Computational linguistics
      keyword:
        Conversational AI
        Information and Computing Sciences Artificial Intelligence and Image Processing
        Intent classification
        Large language models
      ab: Intent classification and sentiment analysis stand as pivotal tasks in natural language understanding (NLU), with applications ranging from virtual assistants to customer service. The advent of transformer-based models has significantly enhanced the performance of various NLP tasks, with encoder-only architectures gaining prominence for their effectiveness. More recently, there has been a surge in the development of larger and more powerful decoder-only models, traditionally employed for text generation tasks. This paper aims to answer the question of whether the colossal scale of newer decoder-only language models is essential for real-world applications. The investigation involves a performance comparison between these decoder-only models and the well-established encoder-only models specifically in the domains of intent classification and sentiment analysis. The results of our study indicate that, for tasks involving natural language understanding, encoder-only models generally outperform decoder-only models, all while demanding a fraction of the computational resources. This sheds light on the practicality and efficiency of encoder-only architectures in comparison to their decoder-only counterparts in real-world applications, providing valuable insights for the advancement of natural language processing technologies.
      pubtype: Academic Journal
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    language: English
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      custom: Language Resources & Evaluation is a copyright of Springer, 2025. All Rights Reserved.
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