Zero-Shot Text Classification via Self-Supervised Tuning

Chaoqun Liu, Wenxuan Zhang, Guizhen Chen, Xiaobao Wu, Anh Tuan Luu, Chip Hong Chang, Lidong Bing


Abstract
Existing solutions to zero-shot text classification either conduct prompting with pre-trained language models, which is sensitive to the choices of templates, or rely on large-scale annotated data of relevant tasks for meta-tuning. In this work, we propose a new paradigm based on self-supervised learning to solve zero-shot text classification tasks by tuning the language models with unlabeled data, called self-supervised tuning. By exploring the inherent structure of free texts, we propose a new learning objective called first sentence prediction to bridge the gap between unlabeled data and text classification tasks. After tuning the model to learn to predict the first sentence in a paragraph based on the rest, the model is able to conduct zero-shot inference on unseen tasks such as topic classification and sentiment analysis. Experimental results show that our model outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines on 7 out of 10 tasks. Moreover, the analysis reveals that our model is less sensitive to the prompt design. Our code and pre-trained models are publicly available at https://github.com/DAMO-NLP-SG/SSTuning.
Anthology ID:
2023.findings-acl.110
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Editors:
Anna Rogers, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Naoaki Okazaki
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1743–1761
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-acl.110
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.findings-acl.110
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Chaoqun Liu, Wenxuan Zhang, Guizhen Chen, Xiaobao Wu, Anh Tuan Luu, Chip Hong Chang, and Lidong Bing. 2023. Zero-Shot Text Classification via Self-Supervised Tuning. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023, pages 1743–1761, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Zero-Shot Text Classification via Self-Supervised Tuning (Liu et al., Findings 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-acl.110.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-acl.110.mp4