Chunliu Dou


2021

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Re-embedding Difficult Samples via Mutual Information Constrained Semantically Oversampling for Imbalanced Text Classification
Jiachen Tian | Shizhan Chen | Xiaowang Zhang | Zhiyong Feng | Deyi Xiong | Shaojuan Wu | Chunliu Dou
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Difficult samples of the minority class in imbalanced text classification are usually hard to be classified as they are embedded into an overlapping semantic region with the majority class. In this paper, we propose a Mutual Information constrained Semantically Oversampling framework (MISO) that can generate anchor instances to help the backbone network determine the re-embedding position of a non-overlapping representation for each difficult sample. MISO consists of (1) a semantic fusion module that learns entangled semantics among difficult and majority samples with an adaptive multi-head attention mechanism, (2) a mutual information loss that forces our model to learn new representations of entangled semantics in the non-overlapping region of the minority class, and (3) a coupled adversarial encoder-decoder that fine-tunes disentangled semantic representations to remain their correlations with the minority class, and then using these disentangled semantic representations to generate anchor instances for each difficult sample. Experiments on a variety of imbalanced text classification tasks demonstrate that anchor instances help classifiers achieve significant improvements over strong baselines.