A Simple and Effective Framework for Strict Zero-Shot Hierarchical Classification

Rohan Bhambhoria, Lei Chen, Xiaodan Zhu


Abstract
In recent years, large language models (LLMs) have achieved strong performance on benchmark tasks, especially in zero or few-shot settings. However, these benchmarks often do not adequately address the challenges posed in the real-world, such as that of hierarchical classification. In order to address this challenge, we propose refactoring conventional tasks on hierarchical datasets into a more indicative long-tail prediction task. We observe LLMs are more prone to failure in these cases. To address these limitations, we propose the use of entailment-contradiction prediction in conjunction with LLMs, which allows for strong performance in a strict zero-shot setting. Importantly, our method does not require any parameter updates, a resource-intensive process and achieves strong performance across multiple datasets.
Anthology ID:
2023.acl-short.152
Volume:
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short 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:
1782–1792
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-short.152
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.acl-short.152
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Rohan Bhambhoria, Lei Chen, and Xiaodan Zhu. 2023. A Simple and Effective Framework for Strict Zero-Shot Hierarchical Classification. In Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers), pages 1782–1792, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
A Simple and Effective Framework for Strict Zero-Shot Hierarchical Classification (Bhambhoria et al., ACL 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-short.152.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-short.152.mp4