HiGen: Hierarchy-Aware Sequence Generation for Hierarchical Text Classification

Vidit Jain, Mukund Rungta, Yuchen Zhuang, Yue Yu, Zeyu Wang, Mu Gao, Jeffrey Skolnick, Chao Zhang


Abstract
Hierarchical text classification (HTC) is a complex subtask under multi-label text classification, characterized by a hierarchical label taxonomy and data imbalance. The best-performing models aim to learn a static representation by combining document and hierarchical label information. However, the relevance of document sections can vary based on the hierarchy level, necessitating a dynamic document representation. To address this, we propose HiGen, a text-generation-based framework utilizing language models to encode dynamic text representations. We introduce a level-guided loss function to capture the relationship between text and label name semantics. Our approach incorporates a task-specific pretraining strategy, adapting the language model to in-domain knowledge and significantly enhancing performance for classes with limited examples. Furthermore, we present a new and valuable dataset called ENZYME, designed for HTC, which comprises articles from PubMed with the goal of predicting Enzyme Commission (EC) numbers. Through extensive experiments on the ENZYME dataset and the widely recognized WOS and NYT datasets, our methodology demonstrates superior performance, surpassing existing approaches while efficiently handling data and mitigating class imbalance. We release our code and dataset here: https://github.com/viditjain99/HiGen.
Anthology ID:
2024.eacl-long.82
Volume:
Proceedings of the 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
March
Year:
2024
Address:
St. Julian’s, Malta
Editors:
Yvette Graham, Matthew Purver
Venue:
EACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1354–1368
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.eacl-long.82
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Vidit Jain, Mukund Rungta, Yuchen Zhuang, Yue Yu, Zeyu Wang, Mu Gao, Jeffrey Skolnick, and Chao Zhang. 2024. HiGen: Hierarchy-Aware Sequence Generation for Hierarchical Text Classification. In Proceedings of the 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 1354–1368, St. Julian’s, Malta. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
HiGen: Hierarchy-Aware Sequence Generation for Hierarchical Text Classification (Jain et al., EACL 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.eacl-long.82.pdf
Software:
 2024.eacl-long.82.software.zip
Note:
 2024.eacl-long.82.note.zip