Benchmarking Zero-shot Text Classification: Datasets, Evaluation and Entailment Approach

Wenpeng Yin, Jamaal Hay, Dan Roth


Abstract
Zero-shot text classification (0Shot-TC) is a challenging NLU problem to which little attention has been paid by the research community. 0Shot-TC aims to associate an appropriate label with a piece of text, irrespective of the text domain and the aspect (e.g., topic, emotion, event, etc.) described by the label. And there are only a few articles studying 0Shot-TC, all focusing only on topical categorization which, we argue, is just the tip of the iceberg in 0Shot-TC. In addition, the chaotic experiments in literature make no uniform comparison, which blurs the progress. This work benchmarks the 0Shot-TC problem by providing unified datasets, standardized evaluations, and state-of-the-art baselines. Our contributions include: i) The datasets we provide facilitate studying 0Shot-TC relative to conceptually different and diverse aspects: the “topic” aspect includes “sports” and “politics” as labels; the “emotion” aspect includes “joy” and “anger”; the “situation” aspect includes “medical assistance” and “water shortage”. ii) We extend the existing evaluation setup (label-partially-unseen) – given a dataset, train on some labels, test on all labels – to include a more challenging yet realistic evaluation label-fully-unseen 0Shot-TC (Chang et al., 2008), aiming at classifying text snippets without seeing task specific training data at all. iii) We unify the 0Shot-TC of diverse aspects within a textual entailment formulation and study it this way.
Anthology ID:
D19-1404
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)
Month:
November
Year:
2019
Address:
Hong Kong, China
Venues:
EMNLP | IJCNLP
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
3914–3923
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/D19-1404
DOI:
10.18653/v1/D19-1404
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Wenpeng Yin, Jamaal Hay, and Dan Roth. 2019. Benchmarking Zero-shot Text Classification: Datasets, Evaluation and Entailment Approach. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP), pages 3914–3923, Hong Kong, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Benchmarking Zero-shot Text Classification: Datasets, Evaluation and Entailment Approach (Yin et al., EMNLP-IJCNLP 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/nodalida-main-page/D19-1404.pdf
Code
 yinwenpeng/BenchmarkingZeroShot +  additional community code
Data
FEVERGLUEMultiNLI