Boosting Transformers: Recognizing Textual Entailment for Classification of Vaccine News Coverage

The introduction of Transformers, neural networks employing self-attention mechanisms, revolutionized Natural Language Processing, handling long-range dependencies and capturing context effectively. Models like BERT and GPT, trained on massive text data, are at the forefront of Large Language Models and have found widespread use in text classification. Despite their benchmark performance, real-world applications pose challenges, including the requirement for substantial labeled data and class balance. Few-shot learning approaches, like the Recognizing Textual Entailment framework, have emerged to address these issues. RTE identifies relationships between a text T and a hypothesis H. T entails H if the meaning of H, as interpreted in the context of T, can be inferred from the meaning of T. This study explores an RTE- based framework for classifying vaccine-related news headlines with only 751 labeled data points distributed unevenly across 10 classes. The study evaluates eight models and procedures. The results highlight that deep transfer learning, combining language and task knowledge, like Transformers and RTE, enables the development of text classification models with superior performance, effectively addressing data scarcity and class imbalance. This approach provides a valuable protocol for creating new text classification models and delivers an advanced automated model for classifying vaccine- related content.