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Soft Contextualized Encoder For User Defined Text Classification

Published: January 6, 2026 | arXiv ID: 2601.03450v1

By: Charu Maheshwari, Vyas Raina

Potential Business Impact:

Helps computers learn new topics instantly.

Business Areas:
Semantic Search Internet Services

User-Defined Text Classification (UDTC) considers the challenge of classifying input text to user-specified, previously unseen classes, a setting that arises frequently in real-world applications such as enterprise analytics, content moderation, and domain-specific information retrieval. We propose a soft-contextualized encoder architecture for UDTC which contextualizes each candidate label with the label set and a static soft prompt representation of the input query. Training on diverse, multi-source datasets enables the model to generalize effectively to zero-shot classification over entirely unseen topic sets drawn from arbitrary domains. We evaluate the proposed architecture both on held-out in-distribution test data and on multiple unseen UDTC benchmarks. Across datasets, the model achieves state-of-the-art performance, consistently outperforming or matching the baselines.

Country of Origin
🇬🇧 United Kingdom

Repos / Data Links

Page Count
14 pages

Category
Computer Science:
Machine Learning (CS)