Papers with Hierarchical text classification
Hierarchical Text Classification with LLM-Refined Taxonomies (2026.eacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Hierarchical text classification (HTC) relies on taxonomies that organize labels into structured hierarchies, but many real-world taxonomies introduce ambiguities, such as identical leaf names under similar parent nodes, which prevent language models from learning clear decision boundaries. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that uses large language models to transform entire taxonomies through operations such as renaming, merging, splitting, and reordering to better match the semantics encoded by LMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms human-curated taxonomies in three HTC benchmarks and shows that it aligns better with the model's actual confusion patterns. |
Developing Prefix-Tuning Models for Hierarchical Text Classification (2022.emnlp-industry)
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| Challenge: | Hierarchical text classification (HTC) is a key task in many industrial applications. Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) have become dominant for most natural language processing (NLP) tasks. |
| Approach: | They investigate how prefix tuning can improve hierarchical text classification . prefix-tuning model only needs less than 1% of parameters to achieve performance . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can achieve comparable performance to regular full fine-tuning. |
HiGen: Hierarchy-Aware Sequence Generation for Hierarchical Text Classification (2024.eacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Hierarchical text classification is a complex subtask under multi-label text classification . the relevance of document sections can vary based on the hierarchy level, necessitating a dynamic document representation. |
| Approach: | They propose a text-generation-based framework that uses language models to encode dynamic text representations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework surpasses existing methods while handling data and mitigating class imbalance. |
Hierarchy-Aware Global Model for Hierarchical Text Classification (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for hierarchical text classification are limited and lack holistic structural information. |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchy-aware global model with two variants that learn hierarchy-based label embeddings through an encoder and conduct inductive fusion of label-alike text features. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on three benchmark datasets. |
Peer-Label Assisted Hierarchical Text Classification (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to hierarchical text classification focus on parent-child relationships . however, some texts with a category hierarchy also have latent relevancy among labels in the same level of the hierarchy. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to analyze latent relevancy of peer labels and a sample importance learning method to ameliorate the side effects. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the latent relevancy of peer labels on standard datasets. |
HPT: Hierarchy-aware Prompt Tuning for Hierarchical Text Classification (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Hierarchical text classification (HTC) is a multi-label classification problem with a complex label hierarchy. |
| Approach: | They propose a Hierarchy-aware Prompt Tuning method to handle HTC from a multi-label perspective using a dynamic virtual template and label words that take the form of soft prompts to fuse the label hierarchy knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance on 3 popular HTC datasets and is adept at handling imbalance and low resource situations. |
Exploiting Global and Local Hierarchies for Hierarchical Text Classification (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods encode label hierarchy in a global view, which makes them hard to exploit hierarchical information. |
| Approach: | They propose to leverage label hierarchy in multi-label text classification by encoding label hierarchy as a static hierarchical structure containing all labels. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves significant improvement on three benchmark datasets compared with the state-of-the-art method HGCLR. |
Hierarchy-aware Label Semantics Matching Network for Hierarchical Text Classification (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods ignore the semantic relationship between text and labels, so they cannot make full use of hierarchical information. |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchy-aware label semantics matching network to model the semantic relationship between text and labels in a semantic matching problem. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model captures the text-label semantics matching relationship among coarse-grained labels and fine-grain labels in a hierarchy-aware manner. |
A Novel Negative Sample Generation Method for Contrastive Learning in Hierarchical Text Classification (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for hierarchical text classification struggle with fine-grained labels, leading to difficulties in accurate classification. |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical sequence ranking method for generating diverse negative samples using hierarchically structured hierarchic labels. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-art (SOTA) on two datasets showing that it can distinguish between fine-grained labels and discriminate. |
HiTIN: Hierarchy-aware Tree Isomorphism Network for Hierarchical Text Classification (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing dual-encoder methods in HTC achieve weak performance gains with huge memory overheads and their structure encoders heavily rely on domain knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchy-aware tree isomorphism network to enhance the text representations with only syntactic information of the label hierarchy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model could boost the performance of hierarchical text classification without prior statistics or label semantics without prior data. |
Hierarchy-aware Biased Bound Margin Loss Function for Hierarchical Text Classification (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Hierarchical text classification (HTC) is a challenging problem with two key issues: utilizing structural information and mitigating label imbalance. |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchy-aware biased bound margin loss function for unit-based HTC models that integrates learnable bounds, biases, and a margin to address static thresholding and mitigate label imbalance adaptively. |
| Outcome: | Experimental results show that the proposed model outperforms the global approach and is more robust to label imbalances. |
Towards Better Hierarchical Text Classification with Data Generation (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to improve hierarchical text classification are expensive and lack high-quality labeled data. |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical text classification framework that can achieve both label controllability and text diversity by extracting high-quality hierarchic label information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can achieve label controllability and text diversity by extracting high-quality hierarchical label information. |
Incorporating Hierarchy into Text Encoder: a Contrastive Learning Approach for Hierarchical Text Classification (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods encode text and label hierarchy separately and mix their representations for classification, where the hierarchy remains unchanged for all input text. |
| Approach: | They propose to embed hierarchy into a text encoder by combining input and output data to generate a hierarchy-aware representation. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets verify the effectiveness of the proposed model. |
Reasoning for Hierarchical Text Classification: The Case of Patents (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Hierarchical text classification (HTC) is one of the hardest HTC scenarios because of professional difficulties and extensive labels. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that reformulates hierarchical classification as a step-by-step reasoning task. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms supervised fine-tuning benchmarks on other widely used HTC benchmarks. |
Dual Prompt Tuning based Contrastive Learning for Hierarchical Text Classification (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods focus on hierarchy-aware text feature by exploiting explicit parent-child relationships, resulting in label confusion within each layer. |
| Approach: | They propose a dual-prompt tuning method which emphasizes discrimination among peer labels by performing contrastive learning on each hierarchical layer. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods on benchmark datasets and is available on github. |
Ensembling Prompting Strategies for Zero-Shot Hierarchical Text Classification with Large Language Models (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Hierarchical text classification is a challenging task in natural language processing. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which integrates the results of diverse prompting strategies to promote LLMs’ reliability. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method boosts the performance of single prompting strategies and achieves SOTA results on three benchmark datasets. |
NER-guided Comprehensive Hierarchy-aware Prompt Tuning for Hierarchical Text Classification (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Hierarchical text classification (HTC) is a challenging task in natural language processing due to its complex taxonomic label hierarchy. |
| Approach: | They propose to use prompts to model hierarchical text classification (HTC) they propose to introduce conditional random fields and Global Pointer to establish hierarchic dependencies . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art (SoTA) performance on three public datasets. |
Utilizing Local Hierarchy with Adversarial Training for Hierarchical Text Classification (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Hierarchical text classification (HTC) is a challenging subtask due to its complex taxonomic structure. |
| Approach: | They propose a local hierarchy framework that can fit in nearly all HTC models and optimize them with the local hierarchy as auxiliary information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is effective in all scenarios and is adept at dealing with complex taxonomic hierarchies. |