Using LLMs for Pre-Annotation of Emotional Manipulation Techniques in a Low-Resource Language Corpus: Are We There Yet?

This paper examines whether incremental prompt engineering can enable reliable large language model (LLM)-based pre-annotation of corpus texts in a low-resource language setting. Using Lithuanian as a case study, we systematically evaluate multiple LLM prompt designs and assess their suitability for generating emotional manipulation annotations for corpus development. We find that performance varies with task complexity, and systematic prompt refinement measurably reduces output instability. Cross-model evaluation of the best-performing prompting strategy shows consistent and similar trends over several modern LLMs. Our results demonstrate that while structured prompts substantially improve output consistency and LLM-assisted annotation can roughly approximate human-produced labels for well-defined categories, the quality of results produced by contemporary LLMs is unsatisfactory for automatic pre-annotation of emotional manipulation techniques in a low-resource language.