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Title: Hierarchical Text Classification with Reinforced Label Assignment
While existing hierarchical text classification (HTC) methods attempt to capture label hierarchies for model training, they either make local decisions regarding each label or completely ignore the hierarchy information during inference. To solve the mismatch between training and inference as well as modeling label dependencies in a more principled way, we formulate HTC as a Markov decision process and propose to learn a Label Assignment Policy via deep reinforcement learning to determine where to place an object and when to stop the assignment process. The proposed method, HiLAP, explores the hierarchy during both training and inference time in a consistent manner and makes inter-dependent decisions. As a general framework, HiLAP can incorporate different neural encoders as base models for end-to-end training. Experiments on five public datasets and four base models show that HiLAP yields an average improvement of 33.4% in Macro-F1 over flat classifiers and outperforms state-of-the-art HTC methods by a large margin.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1704532 1741317 1618481
NSF-PAR ID:
10160136
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
Proc. 2019 Conferenc. on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conf. on Natural Language Processing, EMNLP-IJCNLP 2019,
Volume:
1
Issue:
1
Page Range / eLocation ID:
445 to 455
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
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