Combining Language and Topic Models for Hierarchical Text Classification

TL;DR

This paper investigates combining pre-trained language models with topic models for hierarchical text classification, finding that adding topic model features generally does not improve performance over using PLMs alone.

Contribution

It introduces a novel HTC approach that combines features from PLMs and topic models, and evaluates their effectiveness across multiple benchmark datasets.

Findings

Topic model features often decrease classification performance

PLMs alone outperform combined features in HTC tasks

Incorporating topic models may not always benefit text classification

Abstract

Hierarchical text classification (HTC) is a natural language processing task which has the objective of categorising text documents into a set of classes from a predefined structured class hierarchy. Recent HTC approaches use various techniques to incorporate the hierarchical class structure information with the natural language understanding capabilities of pre-trained language models (PLMs) to improve classification performance. Furthermore, using topic models along with PLMs to extract features from text documents has been shown to be an effective approach for multi-label text classification tasks. The rationale behind the combination of these feature extractor models is that the PLM captures the finer-grained contextual and semantic information while the topic model obtains high-level representations which consider the corpus of documents as a whole. In this paper, we use a HTC approach which uses a PLM and a topic model to extract features from text documents which are used to train a classification model. Our objective is to determine whether the combination of the features extracted from the two models is beneficial to HTC performance in general. In our approach, the extracted features are passed through separate convolutional layers whose outputs are combined and passed to a label-wise attention mechanisms which obtains label-specific document representations by weighing the most important features for each class separately. We perform comprehensive experiments on three HTC benchmark datasets and show that using the features extracted from the topic model generally decreases classification performance compared to only using the features obtained by the PLM. In contrast to previous work, this shows that the incorporation of features extracted from topic models for text classification tasks should not be assumed beneficial.