Papers › Hierarchical Text Classification with Reinforced Label Assignment

Hierarchical Text Classification with Reinforced Label Assignment

27 Aug 2019IJCNLP 2019 11arXiv:1908.10419archive 2025-07-28

Yuning Mao, Jingjing Tian, Jiawei Han, Xiang Ren

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. Data and code can be found at https://github.com/morningmoni/HiLAP.

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morningmoni/HiLAP officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHubpytorch report

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Tasks

ClassificationDeep Reinforcement LearningGeneral ClassificationReinforcement LearningText Classificationtext-classification

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Text Classification RCV1 HiLAP (bow-CNN) Macro F1 60.1 #2 of 4 Archive leaderboard report
Text Classification RCV1 HiLAP (bow-CNN) Micro F1 83.3 #2 of 4 Archive leaderboard report

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Methods

Convolution

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