CLIPTEXT: A New Paradigm for Zero-shot Text Classification

While CLIP models are useful for zero-shot vision-and-language (VL) tasks or computer vision tasks, little attention has been paid to the application of CLIP for language tasks. Intuitively, CLIP model have a rich representation pre-trained with natural language supervision, in which we argue that it is useful for language tasks. Hence, this work bridge this gap by investigating a CLIP model for zero-shot text classification. Specifically, we introduce CLIPTEXT, a novel paradigm for zero-shot text classification, which reformulates zero-shot text classification into a text-image matching problem that CLIP can be applied to. In addition, we further incorporate prompt into CLIPTEXT (PROMPT-CLIPTEXT) to better derive knowledge from CLIP. Experimental results on seven publicly available zero-shot text classification datasets show that both CLIPTEXT and PROMPT-CLIPTEXT attain promising performance. Besides, extensive analysis further verifies that knowledge from CLIP can benefit zero-shot text classification task. We hope this work can attract more breakthroughs on applying VL pre-trained models for language tasks.