Incremental Few-shot Text Classification with Multi-round New Classes: Formulation, Dataset and System

Congying Xia, Wenpeng Yin, Yihao Feng, Philip Yu

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

32 Scopus citations

Abstract

Text classification is usually studied by labeling natural language texts with relevant categories from a predefined set. In the real world, new classes might keep challenging the existing system with limited labeled data. The system should be intelligent enough to recognize upcoming new classes with a few examples. In this work, we define a new task in the NLP domain, incremental few-shot text classification, where the system incrementally handles multiple rounds of new classes. For each round, there is a batch of new classes with a few labeled examples per class. Two major challenges exist in this new task: (i) For the learning process, the system should incrementally learn new classes round by round without re-training on the examples of preceding classes; (ii) For the performance, the system should perform well on new classes without much loss on preceding classes. In addition to formulating the new task, we also release two benchmark datasets 1 in the incremental few-shot setting: intent classification and relation classification. Moreover, we propose two entailment approaches, ENTAILMENT and HYBRID, which show promise for solving this novel problem.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationNAACL-HLT 2021 - 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Subtitle of host publicationHuman Language Technologies, Proceedings of the Conference
PublisherAssociation for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
Pages1351-1360
Number of pages10
ISBN (Electronic)9781954085466
StatePublished - 2021
Event2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, NAACL-HLT 2021 - Virtual, Online
Duration: Jun 6 2021Jun 11 2021

Publication series

NameNAACL-HLT 2021 - 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Proceedings of the Conference

Conference

Conference2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, NAACL-HLT 2021
CityVirtual, Online
Period6/6/216/11/21

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Computer Networks and Communications
  • Hardware and Architecture
  • Information Systems
  • Software

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