Efficient Nearest Neighbor Emotion Classification with BERT-whitening

Abstract

Retrieval-based methods have been proven effective in many NLP tasks. Previous methods use representations from the pre-trained model for similarity search directly. However, the sentence representations from the pre-trained model like BERT perform poorly in retrieving semantically similar sentences, resulting in poor performance of the retrieval-based methods. In this paper, we propose KNN-EC, a simple and efficient non-parametric emotion classification (EC) method using nearest neighbor retrieval. We use BERT-whitening to get better sentence semantics, ensuring that nearest neighbor retrieval works. Meanwhile, BERT-whitening can also reduce memory storage of datastore and accelerate retrieval speed, solving the efficiency problem of the previous methods. KNN-EC average improves the pre-trained model by 1.17 F1-macro on two emotion classification datasets.