Adapting Pretrained Representations for Text Mining

Yu Meng, Jiaxin Huang, Yu Zhang, Jiawei Han

Abstract: Pretrained text representations, evolving from context-free word embeddings to contextualized language models, have brought text mining into a new era: By pretraining neural models on large-scale text corpora and then adapting them to task-specific data, generic linguistic features and knowledge can be effectively transferred to the target applications and remarkable performance has been achieved on many text mining tasks. Unfortunately, a formidable challenge exists in such a prominent pretrain-finetune paradigm: Large pretrained language models (PLMs) usually require a massive amount of training data for stable fine-tuning on downstream tasks, while human annotations in abundance can be costly to acquire. In this tutorial, we introduce recent advances in pretrained text representations, as well as their applications to a wide range of text mining tasks. We focus on minimally-supervised approaches that do not require massive human annotations, including (1) self-supervised text embeddings and pretrained language models that serve as the fundamentals for downstream tasks, (2) unsupervised and distantly-supervised methods for fundamental text mining applications, (3) unsupervised and seed-guided methods for topic discovery from massive text corpora and (4) weakly-supervised methods for text classification and advanced text mining tasks.