Exploiting Global and Local Hierarchies for Hierarchical Text Classification

Hierarchical text classification aims to leverage label hierarchy in multi-label text classification. Existing methods encode label hierarchy in a global view, where label hierarchy is treated as the static hierarchical structure containing all labels. Since global hierarchy is static and irrelevant to text samples, it makes these methods hard to exploit hierarchical information. Contrary to global hierarchy, local hierarchy as the structured target labels hierarchy corresponding to each text sample is dynamic and relevant to text samples, which is ignored in previous methods. To exploit global and local hierarchies, we propose Hierarchy-guided BERT with Global and Local hierarchies (HBGL), which utilizes the large-scale parameters and prior language knowledge of BERT to model both global and local hierarchies. Moreover, HBGL avoids the intentional fusion of semantic and hierarchical modules by directly modeling semantic and hierarchical information with BERT. Compared with the state-of-the-art method HGCLR, our method achieves significant improvement on three benchmark datasets.