A Benchmark on Extremely Weakly Supervised Text Classification:
  Reconcile Seed Matching and Prompting Approaches
Zihan Wang Tianle Wang Dheeraj Mekala Jingbo Shang
Etremely Weakly Supervised Text Classification (XWS-TC) refers to text
classification based on minimal high-level human guidance, such as a few
label-indicative seed words or classification instructions. There are two
mainstream approaches for XWS-TC, however, never being rigorously compared: (1)
training classifiers based on pseudo-labels generated by (softly) matching seed
words (SEED) and (2) prompting (and calibrating) language models using
classification instruction (and raw texts) to decode label words (PROMPT). This
paper presents the first XWS-TC benchmark to compare the two approaches on fair
grounds, where the datasets, supervisions, and hyperparameter choices are
standardized across methods. Our benchmarking results suggest that (1) Both
SEED and PROMPT approaches are competitive and there is no clear winner; (2)
SEED is empirically more tolerant than PROMPT to human guidance (e.g., seed
words, classification instructions, and label words) changes; (3) SEED is
empirically more selective than PROMPT to the pre-trained language models; (4)
Recent SEED and PROMPT methods have close connections and a clustering
post-processing step based on raw in-domain texts is a strong performance
booster to both. We hope this benchmark serves as a guideline in selecting
XWS-TC methods in different scenarios and stimulate interest in developing
guidance- and model-robust XWS-TC methods. We release the repo at
https://github.com/ZihanWangKi/x-TC.