SE-GCL: An Event-Based Simple and Effective Graph Contrastive Learning for Text Representation

Abstract: Text representation learning is significant as the cornerstone of natural language processing. In recent years, graph contrastive learning (GCL) has been widely used in text representation learning due to its ability to represent and capture complex text information in a self-supervised setting. However, current mainstream graph contrastive learning methods often require the incorporation of domain knowledge or cumbersome computations to guide the data augmentation process, which significantly limits the application efficiency and scope of GCL. Additionally, many methods learn text representations only by constructing word-document relationships, which overlooks the rich contextual semantic information in the text. To address these issues and exploit representative textual semantics, we present an event-based, simple, and effective graph contrastive learning (SE-GCL) for text representation. Precisely, we extract event blocks from text and construct internal relation graphs to represent inter-semantic interconnections, which can ensure that the most critical semantic information is preserved. Then, we devise a streamlined, unsupervised graph contrastive learning framework to leverage the complementary nature of the event semantic and structural information for intricate feature data capture. In particular, we introduce the concept of an event skeleton for core representation semantics and simplify the typically complex data augmentation techniques found in existing graph contrastive learning to boost algorithmic efficiency. We employ multiple loss functions to prompt diverse embeddings to converge or diverge within a confined distance in the vector space, ultimately achieving a harmonious equilibrium. We conducted experiments on the proposed SE-GCL on four standard data sets (AG News, 20NG, SougouNews, and THUCNews) to verify its effectiveness in text representation learning.