Hyperbolic Interaction Model for Hierarchical Multi-Label Classification

Abstract

Different from the traditional classification tasks which assume mutual exclusion of labels, hierarchical multi-label classification (HMLC) aims to assign multiple labels to every instance with the labels organized under hierarchical relations. Besides the labels, since linguistic ontologies are intrinsic hierarchies, the conceptual relations between words can also form hierarchical structures. Thus it can be a challenge to learn mappings from word hierarchies to label hierarchies. We propose to model the word and label hierarchies by embedding them jointly in the hyperbolic space. The main reason is that the tree-likeness of the hyperbolic space matches the complexity of symbolic data with hierarchical structures. A new Hyperbolic Interaction Model (HyperIM) is designed to learn the label-aware document representations and make predictions for HMLC. Extensive experiments are conducted on three benchmark datasets. The results have demonstrated that the new model can realistically capture the complex data structures and further improve the performance for HMLC comparing with the state-of-the-art methods. To facilitate future research, our code is publicly available.