A large-scale, unsupervised pipeline for automatic corpus annotation using LLMs: variation and change in the English consider construction

Abstract: As natural language corpora expand at an unprecedented rate, manual annotation remains a significant methodological bottleneck in corpus linguistic work. We address this challenge by presenting a scalable, unsupervised pipeline for automating grammatical annotation in voluminous corpora using LLMs. Unlike previous supervised and iterative approaches, our method employs a four-phase workflow: prompt engineering, pre-hoc evaluation, automated batch processing, and post-hoc validation. We demonstrate the pipeline's accessibility and effectiveness through a diachronic case study of variation in the English consider construction. Using GPT-5 through the OpenAI API, we annotate 143,933 sentences from the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA) in under 60 hours, achieving 98%+ accuracy on two sophisticated annotation procedures. Our results suggest that LLMs can perform a range of data preparation tasks at scale with minimal human intervention, opening new possibilities for corpus-based research, though implementation requires attention to costs, licensing, and other ethical considerations.