Zero-shot multi-label text classification (ZMTC) is a fundamental task in natural language processing with applications in the cold start problem of recommendation systems. Ideally, one would learn an expressive representation of both input text and label features so that ZMTC is transformed into a nearest neighbor search problem. However, the existing representation learning approaches for ZMTC struggle with accuracy as well as poor training efficiency. Firstly, the input text is structural, consisting of both short title sentences and long content paragraphs. It is challenging to model the correlation between short label descriptions and long structural input documents. Secondly, the enormous label space in ZMTC forces the existing approaches to perform multi-stage learning with label engineering. As a result, the training overhead is significant. In this paper, we address both problems by introducing an end-to-end structural contrastive representation learning approach. We propose a randomized text segmentation (RTS) technique to generate high-quality contrastive pairs. This RTS technique allows us to model title-content correlation. Additionally, we simplify the multi-stage ZMTC learning strategy by avoiding label engineering. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach leads to up to 2.33% improvement in precision@1 and 5.94x speedup in training time on publicly available datasets. Our code is available publicly.

Retrieval of relevant vectors produced by representation learning critically influences the efficiency in natural language processing (NLP) tasks. In this paper, we demonstrate an efficient method for searching vectors via a typical non-metric matching function: inner product. Our method, which constructs an approximate Inner Product Delaunay Graph (IPDG) for top-1 Maximum Inner Product Search (MIPS), transforms retrieving the most suitable latent vectors into a graph search problem with great benefits of efficiency. Experiments on data representations learned for different machine learning tasks verify the outperforming effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed IPDG.