LA-HCN: Label-based Attention for Hierarchical Multi-label TextClassification Neural Network

Hierarchical multi-label text classification(HMTC) problems become popular recently because of its practicality. Most existing algorithms for HMTC focus on the design of classifiers, and are largely referred to as local, global, or a combination of local/global approaches. However, a few studies have started exploring hierarchical feature extraction based on the label hierarchy associating with text in HMTC. In this paper, a \textbf{N}eural network-based method called \textbf{LA-HCN} is proposed where a novel \textbf{L}abel-based \textbf{A}ttention module is designed to hierarchically extract important information from the text based on different labels. Besides, local and global document embeddings are separately generated to support the respective local and global classifications. In our experiments, LA-HCN achieves the top performance on the four public HMTC datasets when compared with other neural network-based state-of-the-art algorithms. The comparison between LA-HCN with its variants also demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed label-based attention module as well as the use of the combination of local and global classifications. By visualizing the learned attention(words), we find LA-HCN is able to extract meaningful but different information from text based on different labels which is helpful for human understanding and explanation of classification results.