Improving Zero-Shot Text Classification with Graph-based Knowledge Representations

Abstract

Insufficient training data is a key challenge for text classification. In particular, long-tail class distributions and emerging, new classes do not provide any training data for specific classes. Therefore, such a zeroshot setting must incorporate additional, external knowledge to enable transfer learning by connecting the external knowledge of previously unseen classes to texts. Recent zero-shot text classifier utilize only distributional semantics defined by large language models and based on class names or natural language descriptions. This implicit knowledge contains ambiguities, is not able to capture logical relations nor is it an efficient representation of factual knowledge. These drawbacks can be avoided by introducing explicit, external knowledge. Especially, knowledge graphs provide such explicit, unambiguous, and complementary, domain specific knowledge. Hence, this thesis explores graph-based knowledge as additional modality for zero-shot text classification. Besides a general investigation of this modality, the influence on the capabilities of dealing with domain shifts by including domain-specific knowledge is explored.