Prompt-tuned muti-task taxonomic transformer (PTMTTaxoFormer)

Hierarchical Text Classification (HTC) is a sub-class of multi-label classification. It is challenging because the hierarchy typically has a large number of diverse topics. Existing methods for HTC fall within two categories, local methods (a classifier for each level, node, or parent) or global methods (a single classifier for everything). Local methods are computationally expensive, whereas global methods often require complex explicit injection of the hierarchy, verbalizers, and/or prompt engineering. In this work, we propose Prompt Tuned Multi Task Taxonomic Transformer, a single classifier that uses a multi-task objective to predict one or more topics. The approach is capable of understanding the hierarchy during training without explicit injection, complex heads, verbalizers, or prompt engineering. PTMTTaxo-Former is a novel model architecture and training paradigm using differentiable prompts and labels that are learnt through back-propagation. PTMTTaxoFormer achieves state-of-the-art results on several HTC benchmarks that span a range of topics consistently. Compared to most other HTC models, it has a simpler yet effective architecture, making it more production-friendly in terms of latency requirements (a factor of 2-5 lower latency). It is also robust and label-efficient, outperforming other models with 15%-50% less training data.