Improved neural network-based multi-label classification with better initialization leveraging label co-occurrence

In a multi-label text classification task, in which multiple labels can be assigned to one text, label co-occurrence itself is informative. We propose a novel neural network initialization method to treat some of the neurons in the final hidden layer as dedicated neurons for each pattern of label co-occurrence. These dedicated neurons are initialized to connect to the corresponding co-occurring labels with stronger weights than to others. In experiments with a natural language query classification task, which requires multi-label classification, our initialization method improved classification accuracy without any computational overhead in training and evaluation.