Towards Multi-Label Text Interpretation with Chain-of-Thought Prompting and Contextualized Knowledge

Existing multi-label topic models face several challenges when interpreting texts annotated with multiple labels: (1) they often associate irrelevant text segments with incorrect labels, which negatively impacts both segment and label interpretation; (2) they fail to effectively capture the semantic relationships between tokens and labels within the segment; (3) they do not integrate contextualized knowledge that could improve interpretability. To overcome these issues, we introduce the Contextualized Prompting Topic Model (CPTM). CPTM utilizes Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting to better align text segments with their semantically relevant labels. Furthermore, it integrates label-specific token visualization and topic mining procedure to facilitate the interpretation of tokens and labels. Experimental evaluations conducted on three multi-label text datasets show that CPTM significantly outperforms existing models in both segment and label interpretation. Human assessments also verify CPTM's effectiveness in accurately identifying label-relevant tokens within segments and providing insightful token-level interpretation.