Soft Token Matching for Interpretable Low-Resource Classification

Abstract

We propose a model to tackle classification tasks in the presence of very little training data. To this aim, we introduce a novel matching mechanism to focus on elements of the input by using vectors that represent semantically meaningful concepts for the task at hand. By leveraging highlighted portions of the training data, a simple, yet effective, error boosting technique guides the learning process. In practice, it increases the error associated to relevant parts of the input by a given factor. Results on text classification tasks confirm the benefits of the proposed approach in both balanced and unbalanced cases, thus being of practical use when labeling new examples is expensive. In addition, the model is interpretable, as it allows for human inspection of the learned weights.

Tasks

Reproductions