When Low Resource NLP Meets Unsupervised Language Model: Meta-pretraining Then Meta-learning for Few-shot Text Classification (1908.08788v2)

Abstract: Text classification tends to be difficult when data are deficient or when it is required to adapt to unseen classes. In such challenging scenarios, recent studies have often used meta-learning to simulate the few-shot task, thus negating implicit common linguistic features across tasks. This paper addresses such problems using meta-learning and unsupervised LLMs. Our approach is based on the insight that having a good generalization from a few examples relies on both a generic model initialization and an effective strategy for adapting this model to newly arising tasks. We show that our approach is not only simple but also produces a state-of-the-art performance on a well-studied sentiment classification dataset. It can thus be further suggested that pretraining could be a promising solution for few-shot learning of many other NLP tasks. The code and the dataset to replicate the experiments are made available at https://github.com/zxlzr/FewShotNLP.