Prototype-Guided Pseudo Labeling for Semi-Supervised Text Classification

Semi-supervised text classification (SSTC) aims at text classification with few labeled data and massive unlabeled data. Recent works achieve this task by pseudo-labeling methods, with the belief that the unlabeled and labeled data have identical data distribution, and assign the unlabeled data with pseudo-labels as additional supervision. However, existing pseudo-labeling methods usually suffer from ambiguous categorical boundary issues when training the pseudo-labeling phase, and simply select pseudo-labels without considering the unbalanced categorical distribution of the unlabeled data, making it difficult to generate reliable pseudo-labels for each category. We propose a novel semi-supervised framework, namely ProtoS2, with prototypical cluster separation (PCS) and prototypical-center data selection (CDS) technology to address the issue. Particularly, PCS exploits categorical prototypes to assimilate instance representations within the same category, thus emphasizing low-density separation for the pseudo-labeled data to alleviate ambiguous boundaries. Besides, CDS selects central pseudo-labeled data considering the categorical distribution, avoiding the model from biasing on dominant categories. Empirical studies and extensive analysis with four benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model.