Benchmarking zero-shot text classification: Datasets, evaluation and entailment approach

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.