Most of the current crop of AI-based tools are generative — they generate text and images and use generative pre-trained transformers (GPTs) to do so. For use cases that require working with existing text — to classify pieces of text or to determine intent — sentence transformers are the tool of choice. In this field, SetFit is a framework for fine-tuning sentence transformers. We like SetFit because it uses contrastive learning to separate different intent classes from each other, often achieving clear separation with a very small number of examples, even 25 or less. Sentence transformers can also play a role in a generative AI system. We've successfully used SetFit for intent detection in a customer-facing chatbot system that uses an LLM, and even though we're aware of OpenAI's moderation API, we chose a classifier based on SetFit to perform additional fine-tuning to achieve stricter filtering.
