A Generic Method for Fine-grained Category Discovery in Natural Language Texts

Chang Tian, Matthew Blaschko, Wenpeng Yin, Mingzhe Xing, Yinliang Yue, Marie-Francine Moens


Abstract
Fine-grained category discovery using only coarse-grained supervision is a cost-effective yet challenging task. Previous training methods focus on aligning query samples with positive samples and distancing them from negatives. They often neglect intra-category and inter-category semantic similarities of fine-grained categories when navigating sample distributions in the embedding space. Furthermore, some evaluation techniques that rely on pre-collected test samples are inadequate for real-time applications. To address these shortcomings, we introduce a method that successfully detects fine-grained clusters of semantically similar texts guided by a novel objective function. The method uses semantic similarities in a logarithmic space to guide sample distributions in the Euclidean space and to form distinct clusters that represent fine-grained categories. We also propose a centroid inference mechanism to support real-time applications. The efficacy of the method is both theoretically justified and empirically confirmed on three benchmark tasks. The proposed objective function is integrated in multiple contrastive learning based neural models. Its results surpass existing state-of-the-art approaches in terms of Accuracy, Adjusted Rand Index and Normalized Mutual Information of the detected fine-grained categories. Code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/changtianluckyforever/F-grained-STAR.
Anthology ID:
2024.emnlp-main.208
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Yaser Al-Onaizan, Mohit Bansal, Yun-Nung Chen
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
3548–3566
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.208
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Chang Tian, Matthew Blaschko, Wenpeng Yin, Mingzhe Xing, Yinliang Yue, and Marie-Francine Moens. 2024. A Generic Method for Fine-grained Category Discovery in Natural Language Texts. In Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 3548–3566, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
A Generic Method for Fine-grained Category Discovery in Natural Language Texts (Tian et al., EMNLP 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.208.pdf