Heterogeneous Graph Attention Networks for Semi-supervised Short Text Classification

Hu Linmei, Tianchi Yang, Chuan Shi, Houye Ji, Xiaoli Li


Abstract
Short text classification has found rich and critical applications in news and tweet tagging to help users find relevant information. Due to lack of labeled training data in many practical use cases, there is a pressing need for studying semi-supervised short text classification. Most existing studies focus on long texts and achieve unsatisfactory performance on short texts due to the sparsity and limited labeled data. In this paper, we propose a novel heterogeneous graph neural network based method for semi-supervised short text classification, leveraging full advantage of few labeled data and large unlabeled data through information propagation along the graph. In particular, we first present a flexible HIN (heterogeneous information network) framework for modeling the short texts, which can integrate any type of additional information as well as capture their relations to address the semantic sparsity. Then, we propose Heterogeneous Graph ATtention networks (HGAT) to embed the HIN for short text classification based on a dual-level attention mechanism, including node-level and type-level attentions. The attention mechanism can learn the importance of different neighboring nodes as well as the importance of different node (information) types to a current node. Extensive experimental results have demonstrated that our proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art methods across six benchmark datasets significantly.
Anthology ID:
D19-1488
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)
Month:
November
Year:
2019
Address:
Hong Kong, China
Editors:
Kentaro Inui, Jing Jiang, Vincent Ng, Xiaojun Wan
Venues:
EMNLP | IJCNLP
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
4821–4830
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/D19-1488
DOI:
10.18653/v1/D19-1488
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Hu Linmei, Tianchi Yang, Chuan Shi, Houye Ji, and Xiaoli Li. 2019. Heterogeneous Graph Attention Networks for Semi-supervised Short Text Classification. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP), pages 4821–4830, Hong Kong, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Heterogeneous Graph Attention Networks for Semi-supervised Short Text Classification (Linmei et al., EMNLP-IJCNLP 2019)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/D19-1488.pdf