MetaSLRCL: A Self-Adaptive Learning Rate and Curriculum Learning Based Framework for Few-Shot Text Classification

Kailin Zhao, Xiaolong Jin, Saiping Guan, Jiafeng Guo, Xueqi Cheng


Abstract
Due to the lack of labeled data in many realistic scenarios, a number of few-shot learning methods for text classification have been proposed, among which the meta learning based ones have recently attracted much attention. Such methods usually consist of a learner as the classifier and a meta learner for specializing the learner to different tasks. For the learner, learning rate is crucial to its performance. However, existing methods treat it as a hyper parameter and adjust it manually, which is time-consuming and laborious. Intuitively, for different tasks and neural network layers, the learning rates should be different and self-adaptive. For the meta learner, it requires a good generalization ability so as to quickly adapt to new tasks. Motivated by these issues, we propose a novel meta learning framework, called MetaSLRCL, for few-shot text classification. Specifically, we present a novel meta learning mechanism to obtain different learning rates for different tasks and neural network layers so as to enable the learner to quickly adapt to new training data. Moreover, we propose a task-oriented curriculum learning mechanism to help the meta learner achieve a better generalization ability by learning from different tasks with increasing difficulties. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of MetaSLRCL.
Anthology ID:
2022.coling-1.180
Volume:
Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Month:
October
Year:
2022
Address:
Gyeongju, Republic of Korea
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Chu-Ren Huang, Hansaem Kim, James Pustejovsky, Leo Wanner, Key-Sun Choi, Pum-Mo Ryu, Hsin-Hsi Chen, Lucia Donatelli, Heng Ji, Sadao Kurohashi, Patrizia Paggio, Nianwen Xue, Seokhwan Kim, Younggyun Hahm, Zhong He, Tony Kyungil Lee, Enrico Santus, Francis Bond, Seung-Hoon Na
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
International Committee on Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2065–2074
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.coling-1.180
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Kailin Zhao, Xiaolong Jin, Saiping Guan, Jiafeng Guo, and Xueqi Cheng. 2022. MetaSLRCL: A Self-Adaptive Learning Rate and Curriculum Learning Based Framework for Few-Shot Text Classification. In Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 2065–2074, Gyeongju, Republic of Korea. International Committee on Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
MetaSLRCL: A Self-Adaptive Learning Rate and Curriculum Learning Based Framework for Few-Shot Text Classification (Zhao et al., COLING 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.coling-1.180.pdf
Data
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