# Label-Aware Automatic Verbalizer for Few-Shot Text Classification

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.12778 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.12778/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 17 of its 29 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Oct 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [Character-level Convolutional Networks for Text Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1509.01626/) (2015)
- [Exploiting Cloze Questions for Few Shot Text Classification and Natural Language Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.07676/) (2020)
- [It's Not Just Size That Matters: Small Language Models Are Also Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.07118/) (2020)
- [WARP: Word-level Adversarial ReProgramming](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00121/) (2021)
- [Knowledgeable Prompt-tuning: Incorporating Knowledge into Prompt Verbalizer for Text Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.02035/) (2021)
- [PhoBERT: Pre-trained language models for Vietnamese](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.00744/) (2020)
- [OpenPrompt: An Open-source Framework for Prompt-learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.01998/) (2021)
- [IndoNLU: Benchmark and Resources for Evaluating Indonesian Natural Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.05387/) (2020)
- [Automatically Identifying Words That Can Serve as Labels for Few-Shot Text Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.13641/) (2020)
- [Meta-learning for Few-shot Natural Language Processing: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.09604/) (2020)
- [WangchanBERTa: Pretraining transformer-based Thai Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.09635/) (2021)
- [Improving Large-scale Language Models and Resources for Filipino](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06053/) (2021)
- [Towards Unified Prompt Tuning for Few-shot Text Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.05313/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Prompt-based learning has shown its effectiveness in few-shot text classification. One important factor in its success is a verbalizer, which translates output from a language model into a predicted class. Notably, the simplest and widely acknowledged verbalizer employs manual labels to represent the classes. However, manual selection does not guarantee the optimality of the selected words when conditioned on the chosen language model. Therefore, we propose Label-Aware Automatic Verbalizer (LAAV), effectively augmenting the manual labels to achieve better few-shot classification results. Specifically, we use the manual labels along with the conjunction "and" to induce the model to generate more effective words for the verbalizer. The experimental results on five datasets across five languages demonstrate that LAAV significantly outperforms existing verbalizers. Furthermore, our analysis reveals that LAAV suggests more relevant words compared to similar approaches, especially in mid-to-low resource languages.