Integrating Semantic Knowledge to Tackle Zero-shot Text Classification

Jingqing Zhang, Piyawat Lertvittayakumjorn, Yike Guo


Abstract
Insufficient or even unavailable training data of emerging classes is a big challenge of many classification tasks, including text classification. Recognising text documents of classes that have never been seen in the learning stage, so-called zero-shot text classification, is therefore difficult and only limited previous works tackled this problem. In this paper, we propose a two-phase framework together with data augmentation and feature augmentation to solve this problem. Four kinds of semantic knowledge (word embeddings, class descriptions, class hierarchy, and a general knowledge graph) are incorporated into the proposed framework to deal with instances of unseen classes effectively. Experimental results show that each and the combination of the two phases achieve the best overall accuracy compared with baselines and recent approaches in classifying real-world texts under the zero-shot scenario.
Anthology ID:
N19-1108
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers)
Month:
June
Year:
2019
Address:
Minneapolis, Minnesota
Editors:
Jill Burstein, Christy Doran, Thamar Solorio
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1031–1040
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/N19-1108
DOI:
10.18653/v1/N19-1108
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jingqing Zhang, Piyawat Lertvittayakumjorn, and Yike Guo. 2019. Integrating Semantic Knowledge to Tackle Zero-shot Text Classification. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers), pages 1031–1040, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Integrating Semantic Knowledge to Tackle Zero-shot Text Classification (Zhang et al., NAACL 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/N19-1108.pdf
Presentation:
 N19-1108.Presentation.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/N19-1108.mp4
Code
 JingqingZ/KG4ZeroShotText +  additional community code