@inproceedings{jiang-etal-2026-reasoning,
title = "Reasoning for Hierarchical Text Classification: The Case of Patents",
author = "Jiang, Lekang and
Sun, Wenjun and
Goetz, Stefan",
editor = "Liakata, Maria and
Moreira, Viviane P. and
Zhang, Jiajun and
Jurgens, David",
booktitle = "Findings of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics: {ACL} 2026",
month = jul,
year = "2026",
address = "San Diego, California, United States",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-acl.541/",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2026.findings-acl.541",
pages = "11127--11142",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-395-1",
abstract = "Hierarchical text classification (HTC) assigns documents to multiple levels of a pre-defined taxonomy. Automated patent subject classification represents one of the hardest HTC scenarios because of professional difficulties and extensive labels. Prior approaches only output a flat label set, which offers little insight into the reason behind predictions. Therefore, we propose Reasoning for Hierarchical Classification (RHC), a novel framework that reformulates HTC as a step-by-step reasoning task to sequentially deduce hierarchical labels. RHC trains large language models (LLMs) in two stages: a cold-start stage that aligns outputs with chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning format and a reinforcement learning (RL) stage to enhance multi-step reasoning ability. RHC demonstrates four advantages in our experiments. (1) Effectiveness: RHC surpasses previous baselines and outperforms the supervised fine-tuning counterparts by approximately 3{\%} in accuracy and macro F1. (2) Explainability: RHC produces natural-language justifications before prediction to facilitate human inspection. (3) Scalability: RHC scales favorably with model size with larger gains compared to standard fine-tuning. (4) Applicability: Beyond patents, we further demonstrate that RHC achieves state-of-the-art performance on other widely used HTC benchmarks, which highlights its broad applicability."
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<abstract>Hierarchical text classification (HTC) assigns documents to multiple levels of a pre-defined taxonomy. Automated patent subject classification represents one of the hardest HTC scenarios because of professional difficulties and extensive labels. Prior approaches only output a flat label set, which offers little insight into the reason behind predictions. Therefore, we propose Reasoning for Hierarchical Classification (RHC), a novel framework that reformulates HTC as a step-by-step reasoning task to sequentially deduce hierarchical labels. RHC trains large language models (LLMs) in two stages: a cold-start stage that aligns outputs with chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning format and a reinforcement learning (RL) stage to enhance multi-step reasoning ability. RHC demonstrates four advantages in our experiments. (1) Effectiveness: RHC surpasses previous baselines and outperforms the supervised fine-tuning counterparts by approximately 3% in accuracy and macro F1. (2) Explainability: RHC produces natural-language justifications before prediction to facilitate human inspection. (3) Scalability: RHC scales favorably with model size with larger gains compared to standard fine-tuning. (4) Applicability: Beyond patents, we further demonstrate that RHC achieves state-of-the-art performance on other widely used HTC benchmarks, which highlights its broad applicability.</abstract>
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T Reasoning for Hierarchical Text Classification: The Case of Patents
%A Jiang, Lekang
%A Sun, Wenjun
%A Goetz, Stefan
%Y Liakata, Maria
%Y Moreira, Viviane P.
%Y Zhang, Jiajun
%Y Jurgens, David
%S Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
%D 2026
%8 July
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C San Diego, California, United States
%@ 979-8-89176-395-1
%F jiang-etal-2026-reasoning
%X Hierarchical text classification (HTC) assigns documents to multiple levels of a pre-defined taxonomy. Automated patent subject classification represents one of the hardest HTC scenarios because of professional difficulties and extensive labels. Prior approaches only output a flat label set, which offers little insight into the reason behind predictions. Therefore, we propose Reasoning for Hierarchical Classification (RHC), a novel framework that reformulates HTC as a step-by-step reasoning task to sequentially deduce hierarchical labels. RHC trains large language models (LLMs) in two stages: a cold-start stage that aligns outputs with chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning format and a reinforcement learning (RL) stage to enhance multi-step reasoning ability. RHC demonstrates four advantages in our experiments. (1) Effectiveness: RHC surpasses previous baselines and outperforms the supervised fine-tuning counterparts by approximately 3% in accuracy and macro F1. (2) Explainability: RHC produces natural-language justifications before prediction to facilitate human inspection. (3) Scalability: RHC scales favorably with model size with larger gains compared to standard fine-tuning. (4) Applicability: Beyond patents, we further demonstrate that RHC achieves state-of-the-art performance on other widely used HTC benchmarks, which highlights its broad applicability.
%R 10.18653/v1/2026.findings-acl.541
%U https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-acl.541/
%U https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2026.findings-acl.541
%P 11127-11142
Markdown (Informal)
[Reasoning for Hierarchical Text Classification: The Case of Patents](https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-acl.541/) (Jiang et al., Findings 2026)
ACL