This work investigates the use of natural language to enable zero-shot model adaptation to new tasks. We use text and metadata from social commenting platforms as a source for a simple pretraining task. We then provide the language model with natural language descriptions of classification tasks as input and train it to generate the correct answer in natural language via a language modeling objective. This allows the model to generalize to new classification tasks without the need for multiple multitask classification heads. We show the zero-shot performance of these generative language models, trained with weak supervision, on six benchmark text classification datasets from the torchtext library. Despite no access to training data, we achieve up to a 45% absolute improvement in classification accuracy over random or majority class baselines. These results show that natural language can serve as simple and powerful descriptors for task adaptation. We believe this points the way to new metalearning strategies for text problems.

本文研究了使用自然语言实现零样本模型对新任务的自适应性，通过社交评论平台的文本和元数据作为简单的预训练任务，并提供分类任务的自然语言描述作为输入训练语言模型，以生成正确答案的方式进行自然语言的模型推广，克服了多任务分类的缺点，在六个基准文本分类数据集上训练出具有零样本性能的生成性语言模型，结果显示语言可以作为任务自适应的简单而强大的描述符，这为文本问题的新元学习策略指明了方向。

利用生成语言模型进行零样本文本分类