Artificial Conversations, Real Results: Fostering Language Detection with Synthetic Data

Abstract: Collecting high-quality training data is essential for fine-tuning LLMs. However, acquiring such data is often costly and time-consuming, especially for non-English languages such as Italian. Recently, researchers have begun to explore the use of LLMs to generate synthetic datasets as a viable alternative. This study proposes a pipeline for generating synthetic data and a comprehensive approach for investigating the factors that influence the validity of synthetic data generated by LLMs by examining how model performance is affected by metrics such as prompt strategy, text length and target position in a specific task, i.e. inclusive language detection in Italian job advertisements. Our results show that, in most cases and across different metrics, the fine-tuned models trained on synthetic data consistently outperformed other models on both real and synthetic test datasets. The study discusses the practical implications and limitations of using synthetic data for language detection tasks with LLMs.