Yunting Xie and Matti La Mela present at workshop on “Machine Learning and Big Data in Economic History” at Universität Hohenheim

February 2026. Yunting and Matti presented the paper 'You have no class! Large Language Model Classification of Nineteenth Century Patents in Sweden, 1852-1914', where we use large language models to classify historical patents, that had not received any technical classification at the time. We contrast human classification results with a BERT baseline and a commercial model; interestingly, we see that fine-tuned BERT (using Swedish BERT by KB) perform almost as well as the commercial model does through zero-shot prompting. The work continues..

Big thanks to the organizers, Felix Selgert and Sibylle Lehmann-Hasemayer!