{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/weakly-supervised-text-classification-using","title":"Weakly Supervised Text Classification using Supervision Signals from a Language Model","arxiv_id":"2205.06604","date":"2022-05-13","proceeding":"Findings (NAACL) 2022 7","authors":["Ziqian Zeng","Weimin Ni","Tianqing Fang","Xiang Li","Xinran Zhao","Yangqiu Song"],"abstract":"Solving text classification in a weakly supervised manner is important for real-world applications where human annotations are scarce. In this paper, we propose to query a masked language model with cloze style prompts to obtain supervision signals. We design a prompt which combines the document itself and \"this article is talking about [MASK].\" A masked language model can generate words for the [MASK] token. The generated words which summarize the content of a document can be utilized as supervision signals. We propose a latent variable model to learn a word distribution learner which associates generated words to pre-defined categories and a document classifier simultaneously without using any annotated data. Evaluation on three datasets, AGNews, 20Newsgroups, and UCINews, shows that our method can outperform baselines by 2%, 4%, and 3%.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.06604v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2205.06604v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"weakly-supervised-text-classification-using","repo_url":"https://github.com/hkust-knowcomp/wddc","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"language-modeling","task_name":"Language Modeling"},{"task_slug":"language-modelling","task_name":"Language Modelling"},{"task_slug":"text-classification","task_name":"Text Classification"},{"task_slug":"text-classification-1","task_name":"text-classification"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2205.06604","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}