A weakly supervised textual entailment approach to zero-shot text classification

Marc Pàmies, Joan Llop, Francesco Multari, Nicolau Duran-Silva, César Parra-Rojas, Aitor Gonzalez-Agirre, Francesco Alessandro Massucci, Marta Villegas


Abstract
Zero-shot text classification is a widely studied task that deals with a lack of annotated data. The most common approach is to reformulate it as a textual entailment problem, enabling classification into unseen classes. This work explores an effective approach that trains on a weakly supervised dataset generated from traditional classification data. We empirically study the relation between the performance of the entailment task, which is used as a proxy, and the target zero-shot text classification task. Our findings reveal that there is no linear correlation between both tasks, to the extent that it can be detrimental to lengthen the fine-tuning process even when the model is still learning, and propose a straightforward method to stop training on time. As a proof of concept, we introduce a domain-specific zero-shot text classifier that was trained on Microsoft Academic Graph data. The model, called SCIroShot, achieves state-of-the-art performance in the scientific domain and competitive results in other areas. Both the model and evaluation benchmark are publicly available on HuggingFace and GitHub.
Anthology ID:
2023.eacl-main.22
Volume:
Proceedings of the 17th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Month:
May
Year:
2023
Address:
Dubrovnik, Croatia
Editors:
Andreas Vlachos, Isabelle Augenstein
Venue:
EACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
286–296
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.eacl-main.22
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.eacl-main.22
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Marc Pàmies, Joan Llop, Francesco Multari, Nicolau Duran-Silva, César Parra-Rojas, Aitor Gonzalez-Agirre, Francesco Alessandro Massucci, and Marta Villegas. 2023. A weakly supervised textual entailment approach to zero-shot text classification. In Proceedings of the 17th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 286–296, Dubrovnik, Croatia. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
A weakly supervised textual entailment approach to zero-shot text classification (Pàmies et al., EACL 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.eacl-main.22.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.eacl-main.22.mp4