Effective Few Shot Classification with Transfer Learning

Few-shot learning addresses the the problem of learning based on a small amount of training data. Although more well-studied in the domain of computer vision, recent work has adapted the Amazon Review Sentiment Classification (ARSC) text dataset for use in the few-shot setting. In this work, we use the ARSC dataset to study a simple application of transfer learning approaches to few-shot classification. We train a single binary classifier to learn all few-shot classes jointly by prefixing class identifiers to the input text. Given the text and class, the model then makes a binary prediction for that text/class pair. Our results show that this simple approach can outperform most published results on this dataset. Surprisingly, we also show that including domain information as part of the task definition only leads to a modest improvement in model accuracy, and zeroshot classification, without further fine-tuning on few-shot domains, performs equivalently to few-shot classification. These results suggest that the classes in the ARSC few-shot task, which are defined by the intersection of domain and rating, are actually very similar to each other, and that a more suitable dataset is needed for the study of few-shot text classification.