In this paper, we propose a new few-shot text classification method. Compared with supervised learning methods which require a large corpus of labeled documents, our method aims to make it possible to classify unlabeled text with few labeled data. To achieve this goal, we take advantage of advanced pre-trained language model to extract the semantic features of each document. Furthermore, we utilize an edge-labeling graph neural network to implicitly models the intra-cluster similarity and the inter-cluster dissimilarity of the documents. Finally, we take the results of the graph neural network as the input of a prototypical network to classify the unlabeled texts. We verify the effectiveness of our method on a sentiment analysis dataset and a relation classification dataset and achieve the state-of-the-art performance on both tasks.

Pre-trained language models like BERT have proven to be highly performant. However, they are often computationally expensive in many practical scenarios, for such heavy models can hardly be readily implemented with limited resources. To improve their efficiency with an assured model performance, we propose a novel speed-tunable FastBERT with adaptive inference time. The speed at inference can be flexibly adjusted under varying demands, while redundant calculation of samples is avoided. Moreover, this model adopts a unique self-distillation mechanism at fine-tuning, further enabling a greater computational efficacy with minimal loss in performance. Our model achieves promising results in twelve English and Chinese datasets. It is able to speed up by a wide range from 1 to 12 times than BERT if given different speedup thresholds to make a speed-performance tradeoff.