Breaking the gap between label correlation and instance similarity via new multi-label contrastive learning

Multi-label text classification (MLTC) is a fundamental yet challenging task in natural language processing. Existing MLTC models mostly learn text representations and label correlations, separately; while the instance-level correlation, which is crucial for the classification is ignored. To rectify this, we propose a new multi-label contrastive learning model, that captures instance-level correlations, for the MLTC task. Specifically, we first learn label representations by using Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) on label co-occurrence graphs. We next learn text representations by taking label correlations into consideration. Through an attention mechanism, instance-level correlation can be established. To better utilize label correlations, we propose a new contrastive learning model, whose learning is guided by a new learning objective, to further refine label representations. We finally implement a $k$-NN mechanism, that identifies $k$ nearest neighbors of a given text for final prediction. Intensive experimental studies over benchmark multi-label datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.