Rank-Aware Negative Training for Semi-Supervised Text Classification

Ahmed Murtadha, Shengfeng Pan, Wen Bo, Jianlin Su, Xinxin Cao, Wenze Zhang, Yunfeng Liu


Abstract
Semi-supervised text classification-based paradigms (SSTC) typically employ the spirit of self-training. The key idea is to train a deep classifier on limited labeled texts and then iteratively predict the unlabeled texts as their pseudo-labels for further training. However, the performance is largely affected by the accuracy of pseudo-labels, which may not be significant in real-world scenarios. This paper presents a Rank-aware Negative Training (RNT) framework to address SSTC in learning with noisy label settings. To alleviate the noisy information, we adapt a reasoning with uncertainty-based approach to rank the unlabeled texts based on the evidential support received from the labeled texts. Moreover, we propose the use of negative training to train RNT based on the concept that “the input instance does not belong to the complementary label”. A complementary label is randomly selected from all labels except the label on-target. Intuitively, the probability of a true label serving as a complementary label is low and thus provides less noisy information during the training, resulting in better performance on the test data. Finally, we evaluate the proposed solution on various text classification benchmark datasets. Our extensive experiments show that it consistently overcomes the state-of-the-art alternatives in most scenarios and achieves competitive performance in the others. The code of RNT is publicly available on GitHub.
Anthology ID:
2023.tacl-1.45
Volume:
Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Volume 11
Month:
Year:
2023
Address:
Cambridge, MA
Venue:
TACL
SIG:
Publisher:
MIT Press
Note:
Pages:
771–786
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.tacl-1.45
DOI:
10.1162/tacl_a_00574
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ahmed Murtadha, Shengfeng Pan, Wen Bo, Jianlin Su, Xinxin Cao, Wenze Zhang, and Yunfeng Liu. 2023. Rank-Aware Negative Training for Semi-Supervised Text Classification. Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 11:771–786.
Cite (Informal):
Rank-Aware Negative Training for Semi-Supervised Text Classification (Murtadha et al., TACL 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.tacl-1.45.pdf