Unified benchmark for zero-shot Turkish text classification

Abstract

Effective learning schemes such as fine-tuning, zero-shot, and few-shot learning, have been widely used to obtain considerable performance with only a handful of annotated training data. In this paper, we presented a unified benchmark to facilitate the problem of zero-shot text classification in Turkish. For this purpose, we evaluated three methods, namely, Natural Language Inference, Next Sentence Prediction and our proposed model that is based on Masked Language Modeling and pre-trained word embeddings on nine Turkish datasets for three main categories: topic, sentiment, and emotion. We used pre-trained Turkish monolingual and multilingual transformer models which can be listed as BERT, ConvBERT, DistilBERT and mBERT. The results showed that ConvBERT with the NLI method yields the best results with 79% and outperforms previously used multilingual XLM-RoBERTa model by 19.6%. The study contributes to the literature using different and unattempted transformer models for Turkish and showing improvement of zero-shot text classification performance for monolingual models over multilingual models.