Abstract:Hierarchical text classification (HTC) to a taxonomy is essential for various real applications butchallenging since HTC models often need to process a large volume of data that are severelyimbalanced and have hierarchy dependencies. Existing local and global approaches use deep learningto improve HTC by reducing the time complexity and incorporating the hierarchy dependencies.However, it is difficult to satisfy both conditions in a single HTC model. This paper proposes ahierarchy decoder (HiDEC) that uses recursive hierarchy decoding based on an encoder-decoderarchitecture. The key idea of the HiDEC involves decoding a context matrix into a sub-hierarchysequence using recursive hierarchy decoding, while staying aware of hierarchical dependenciesand level information. The HiDEC is a unified model that incorporates the benefits of existingapproaches, thereby alleviating the aforementioned difficulties without any trade-off. In addition, itcan be applied to both single- and multi-label classification with a minor modification. The superiorityof the proposed model was verified on two benchmark datasets (WOS-46985 and RCV1) with anexplanation of the reasons for its success