Abstract
Text classification techniques have been substantially important to many smart computing applications, e.g. topic extraction and event detection. However, classification is always challenging when only insufficient amount of labelled data for model training is available. To mitigate this issue, zero-shot learning (ZSL) has been introduced for models to recognise new classes that have not been observed during the training stage. We propose an entailment-based zero-shot text classification model, named as S-BERT-CAM, to better capture the relationship between the premise and hypothesis in the BERT embedding space. Two widely used textual datasets are utilised to conduct the experiments. We fine-tune our model using 50% of the labels for each dataset and evaluate it on the label space containing all labels (including both seen and unseen labels). The experimental results demonstrate that our model is more robust to the generalised ZSL and significantly improves the overall performance against baselines.