Extreme Multi-label Text Classification (XMTC) has been a tough challenge in machine learning research and applications due to the sheer sizes of the label spaces and the severe data scarcity problem associated with the long tail of rare labels in highly skewed distributions. This paper addresses the challenge of tail label prediction by leveraging the power of dense neural retrieval model in mapping input documents (as queries) to relevant label descriptions. To further enhance the quality of label descriptions, we propose to generate pseudo label descriptions from a trained bag-of-words (BoW) classifier, which demonstrates better classification performance under severe scarce data conditions. The proposed approach achieves the state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance of overall label prediction on XMTC benchmark datasets and especially outperforms the SOTA models in the tail label prediction. We also provide a theoretical analysis for relating the BoW and neural models w.r.t. performance lower bound.

We present PESCO, a novel contrastive learning framework that substantially improves the performance of zero-shot text classification. We formulate text classification as a neural text retrieval problem where each document is treated as a query, and the system learns the mapping from each query to the relevant class labels by (1) adding prompts to enhance label retrieval, and (2) using retrieved labels to enrich the training set in a self-training loop of contrastive learning. PESCO achieves state-of-the-art performance on four benchmark text classification datasets. On DBpedia, we achieve 98.5% accuracy without any labeled data, which is close to the fully-supervised result. Extensive experiments and analyses show all the components of PESCO are necessary for improving the performance of zero-shot text classification.