TART: Improved Few-shot Text Classification Using Task-Adaptive Reference Transformation

Shuo Lei, Xuchao Zhang, Jianfeng He, Fanglan Chen, Chang-Tien Lu


Abstract
Meta-learning has emerged as a trending technique to tackle few-shot text classification and achieve state-of-the-art performance. However, the performance of existing approaches heavily depends on the inter-class variance of the support set. As a result, it can perform well on tasks when the semantics of sampled classes are distinct while failing to differentiate classes with similar semantics. In this paper, we propose a novel Task-Adaptive Reference Transformation (TART) network, aiming to enhance the generalization by transforming the class prototypes to per-class fixed reference points in task-adaptive metric spaces. To further maximize divergence between transformed prototypes in task-adaptive metric spaces, TART introduces a discriminative reference regularization among transformed prototypes. Extensive experiments are conducted on four benchmark datasets and our method demonstrates clear superiority over the state-of-the-art models in all the datasets. In particular, our model surpasses the state-of-the-art method by 7.4% and 5.4% in 1-shot and 5-shot classification on the 20 Newsgroups dataset, respectively.
Anthology ID:
2023.acl-long.617
Volume:
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Editors:
Anna Rogers, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Naoaki Okazaki
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
11014–11026
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.617
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.acl-long.617
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Shuo Lei, Xuchao Zhang, Jianfeng He, Fanglan Chen, and Chang-Tien Lu. 2023. TART: Improved Few-shot Text Classification Using Task-Adaptive Reference Transformation. In Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 11014–11026, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
TART: Improved Few-shot Text Classification Using Task-Adaptive Reference Transformation (Lei et al., ACL 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.617.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.617.mp4