English

Cross Encoding as Augmentation: Towards Effective Educational Text Classification

Computation and Language 2023-06-01 v2

Abstract

Text classification in education, usually called auto-tagging, is the automated process of assigning relevant tags to educational content, such as questions and textbooks. However, auto-tagging suffers from a data scarcity problem, which stems from two major challenges: 1) it possesses a large tag space and 2) it is multi-label. Though a retrieval approach is reportedly good at low-resource scenarios, there have been fewer efforts to directly address the data scarcity problem. To mitigate these issues, here we propose a novel retrieval approach CEAA that provides effective learning in educational text classification. Our main contributions are as follows: 1) we leverage transfer learning from question-answering datasets, and 2) we propose a simple but effective data augmentation method introducing cross-encoder style texts to a bi-encoder architecture for more efficient inference. An extensive set of experiments shows that our proposed method is effective in multi-label scenarios and low-resource tags compared to state-of-the-art models.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2305.18977,
  title  = {Cross Encoding as Augmentation: Towards Effective Educational Text Classification},
  author = {Hyun Seung Lee and Seungtaek Choi and Yunsung Lee and Hyeongdon Moon and Shinhyeok Oh and Myeongho Jeong and Hyojun Go and Christian Wallraven},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2305.18977},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

Accepted to Findings of ACL2023

R2 v1 2026-06-28T10:50:34.685Z