A Simple and Effective Framework for Strict Zero-Shot Hierarchical Classification

Abstract: In recent years, LLMs have achieved strong performance on benchmark tasks, especially in zero or few-shot settings. However, these benchmarks often do not adequately address the challenges posed in the real-world, such as that of hierarchical classification. In order to address this challenge, we propose refactoring conventional tasks on hierarchical datasets into a more indicative long-tail prediction task. We observe LLMs are more prone to failure in these cases. To address these limitations, we propose the use of entailment-contradiction prediction in conjunction with LLMs, which allows for strong performance in a strict zero-shot setting. Importantly, our method does not require any parameter updates, a resource-intensive process and achieves strong performance across multiple datasets.