Discriminative Language Model as Semantic Consistency Scorer for Prompt-based Few-Shot Text Classification

Zhipeng Xie, Yahe Li


Abstract
A successful prompt-based finetuning method should have three prerequisites: task compatibility, input compatibility, and evidence abundance. Bearing this belief in mind, this paper designs a novel prompt-based method (called DLM-SCS) for few-shot text classification, which utilizes the discriminative language model ELECTRA that is pretrained to distinguish whether a token is original or replaced. The method is built upon the intuitive idea that the prompt instantiated with the true label should have higher semantic consistency score than other prompts with false labels. Since a prompt usually consists of several components (or parts), its semantic consistency can be decomposed accordingly, which means each part can provide information for semantic consistency discrimination. The semantic consistency of each component is then computed by making use of the pretrained ELECTRA model, where no extra parameters get introduced. Extensive experiments have shown that our model outperforms several state-of-the-art prompt-based few-shot methods on 10 widely-used text classification tasks.
Anthology ID:
2024.lrec-main.445
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)
Month:
May
Year:
2024
Address:
Torino, Italia
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Min-Yen Kan, Veronique Hoste, Alessandro Lenci, Sakriani Sakti, Nianwen Xue
Venues:
LREC | COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA and ICCL
Note:
Pages:
4968–4977
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.445
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Zhipeng Xie and Yahe Li. 2024. Discriminative Language Model as Semantic Consistency Scorer for Prompt-based Few-Shot Text Classification. In Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), pages 4968–4977, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
Cite (Informal):
Discriminative Language Model as Semantic Consistency Scorer for Prompt-based Few-Shot Text Classification (Xie & Li, LREC-COLING 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.445.pdf