Abstract:Short text classification has gained significant attention in the information age due to its prevalence and real-world applications. Recent advancements in graph learning combined with contrastive learning have shown promising results in addressing the challenges of semantic sparsity and limited labeled data in short text classification. However, existing models have certain limitations. They rely on explicit data augmentation techniques to generate contrastive views, resulting in semantic corruption and noise. Additionally, these models only focus on learning the intrinsic consistency between the generated views, neglecting valuable discriminative information from other potential views. To address these issues, we propose a Simple graph contrastive learning framework for Short Text Classification (SimSTC). Our approach involves performing graph learning on multiple text-related component graphs to obtain multi-view text embeddings. Subsequently, we directly apply contrastive learning on these embeddings. Notably, our method eliminates the need for data augmentation operations to generate contrastive views while still leveraging the benefits of multi-view contrastive learning. Despite its simplicity, our model achieves outstanding performance, surpassing large language models on various datasets.
Abstract:Short text classification, as a research subtopic in natural language processing, is more challenging due to its semantic sparsity and insufficient labeled samples in practical scenarios. We propose a novel model named MI-DELIGHT for short text classification in this work. Specifically, it first performs multi-source information (i.e., statistical information, linguistic information, and factual information) exploration to alleviate the sparsity issues. Then, the graph learning approach is adopted to learn the representation of short texts, which are presented in graph forms. Moreover, we introduce a dual-level (i.e., instance-level and cluster-level) contrastive learning auxiliary task to effectively capture different-grained contrastive information within massive unlabeled data. Meanwhile, previous models merely perform the main task and auxiliary tasks in parallel, without considering the relationship among tasks. Therefore, we introduce a hierarchical architecture to explicitly model the correlations between tasks. We conduct extensive experiments across various benchmark datasets, demonstrating that MI-DELIGHT significantly surpasses previous competitive models. It even outperforms popular large language models on several datasets.
Abstract:Graph few-shot learning has garnered significant attention for its ability to rapidly adapt to downstream tasks with limited labeled data, sparking considerable interest among researchers. Recent advancements in graph few-shot learning models have exhibited superior performance across diverse applications. Despite their successes, several limitations still exist. First, existing models in the meta-training phase predominantly focus on instance-level features within tasks, neglecting crucial set-level features essential for distinguishing between different categories. Second, these models often utilize query sets directly on classifiers trained with support sets containing only a few labeled examples, overlooking potential distribution shifts between these sets and leading to suboptimal performance. Finally, previous models typically require necessitate abundant labeled data from base classes to extract transferable knowledge, which is typically infeasible in real-world scenarios. To address these issues, we propose a novel model named STAR, which leverages Set funcTions and optimAl tRansport for enhancing unsupervised graph few-shot learning. Specifically, STAR utilizes expressive set functions to obtain set-level features in an unsupervised manner and employs optimal transport principles to align the distributions of support and query sets, thereby mitigating distribution shift effects. Theoretical analysis demonstrates that STAR can capture more task-relevant information and enhance generalization capabilities. Empirically, extensive experiments across multiple datasets validate the effectiveness of STAR. Our code can be found here.
Abstract:Node classification is an essential problem in graph learning. However, many models typically obtain unsatisfactory performance when applied to few-shot scenarios. Some studies have attempted to combine meta-learning with graph neural networks to solve few-shot node classification on graphs. Despite their promising performance, some limitations remain. First, they employ the node encoding mechanism of homophilic graphs to learn node embeddings, even in heterophilic graphs. Second, existing models based on meta-learning ignore the interference of randomness in the learning process. Third, they are trained using only limited labeled nodes within the specific task, without explicitly utilizing numerous unlabeled nodes. Finally, they treat almost all sampled tasks equally without customizing them for their uniqueness. To address these issues, we propose a novel framework for few-shot node classification called Meta-GPS++. Specifically, we first adopt an efficient method to learn discriminative node representations on homophilic and heterophilic graphs. Then, we leverage a prototype-based approach to initialize parameters and contrastive learning for regularizing the distribution of node embeddings. Moreover, we apply self-training to extract valuable information from unlabeled nodes. Additionally, we adopt S$^2$ (scaling & shifting) transformation to learn transferable knowledge from diverse tasks. The results on real-world datasets show the superiority of Meta-GPS++. Our code is available here.
Abstract:Natural Language Inference (NLI) is a crucial task in natural language processing that involves determining the relationship between two sentences, typically referred to as the premise and the hypothesis. However, traditional NLI models solely rely on the semantic information inherent in independent sentences and lack relevant situational visual information, which can hinder a complete understanding of the intended meaning of the sentences due to the ambiguity and vagueness of language. To address this challenge, we propose an innovative ScenaFuse adapter that simultaneously integrates large-scale pre-trained linguistic knowledge and relevant visual information for NLI tasks. Specifically, we first design an image-sentence interaction module to incorporate visuals into the attention mechanism of the pre-trained model, allowing the two modalities to interact comprehensively. Furthermore, we introduce an image-sentence fusion module that can adaptively integrate visual information from images and semantic information from sentences. By incorporating relevant visual information and leveraging linguistic knowledge, our approach bridges the gap between language and vision, leading to improved understanding and inference capabilities in NLI tasks. Extensive benchmark experiments demonstrate that our proposed ScenaFuse, a scenario-guided approach, consistently boosts NLI performance.
Abstract:Text classification is a crucial and fundamental task in natural language processing. Compared with the previous learning paradigm of pre-training and fine-tuning by cross entropy loss, the recently proposed supervised contrastive learning approach has received tremendous attention due to its powerful feature learning capability and robustness. Although several studies have incorporated this technique for text classification, some limitations remain. First, many text datasets are imbalanced, and the learning mechanism of supervised contrastive learning is sensitive to data imbalance, which may harm the model performance. Moreover, these models leverage separate classification branch with cross entropy and supervised contrastive learning branch without explicit mutual guidance. To this end, we propose a novel model named SharpReCL for imbalanced text classification tasks. First, we obtain the prototype vector of each class in the balanced classification branch to act as a representation of each class. Then, by further explicitly leveraging the prototype vectors, we construct a proper and sufficient target sample set with the same size for each class to perform the supervised contrastive learning procedure. The empirical results show the effectiveness of our model, which even outperforms popular large language models across several datasets.
Abstract:Knowledge graphs (KGs) have received increasing attention due to its wide applications on natural language processing. However, its use case on temporal question answering (QA) has not been well-explored. Most of existing methods are developed based on pre-trained language models, which might not be capable to learn \emph{temporal-specific} presentations of entities in terms of temporal KGQA task. To alleviate this problem, we propose a novel \textbf{T}ime-aware \textbf{M}ultiway \textbf{A}daptive (\textbf{TMA}) fusion network. Inspired by the step-by-step reasoning behavior of humans. For each given question, TMA first extracts the relevant concepts from the KG, and then feeds them into a multiway adaptive module to produce a \emph{temporal-specific} representation of the question. This representation can be incorporated with the pre-trained KG embedding to generate the final prediction. Empirical results verify that the proposed model achieves better performance than the state-of-the-art models in the benchmark dataset. Notably, the Hits@1 and Hits@10 results of TMA on the CronQuestions dataset's complex questions are absolutely improved by 24\% and 10\% compared to the best-performing baseline. Furthermore, we also show that TMA employing an adaptive fusion mechanism can provide interpretability by analyzing the proportion of information in question representations.