MatchXML: An Efficient Text-Label Matching Framework for Extreme Multi-Label Text Classification

Hui Ye, Rajshekhar Sunderraman, Shihao Ji

Abstract: The eXtreme Multi-label text Classification (XMC) refers to training a classifier that assigns a text sample with relevant labels from an extremely large-scale label set (e.g., millions of labels). We propose MatchXML, an efficient text-label matching framework for XMC. We observe that the label embeddings generated from the sparse Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency (TF–IDF) features have several limitations. We thus propose label2vec to effectively train the semantic dense label embeddings by the Skip-gram model. The dense label embeddings are then used to build a Hierarchical Label Tree by clustering. In fine-tuning the pre-trained encoder Transformer, we formulate the multi-label text classification as a text-label matching problem in a bipartite graph. We then extract the dense text representations from the fine-tuned Transformer. Besides the fine-tuned dense text embeddings, we also extract the static dense sentence embeddings from a pre-trained Sentence Transformer. Finally, a linear ranker is trained by utilizing the sparse TF–IDF features, the fine-tuned dense text representations, and static dense sentence features. Experimental results demonstrate that MatchXML achieves the state-of-the-art accuracies on five out of six datasets. As for the training speed, MatchXML outperforms the competing methods on all the six datasets.