A Survey of Multi-Label Text Classification Under Few-Shot Scenarios
Wenlong Hu, Qiang Fan, Hao Yan, Xinyao Xu, Shan Huang, Ke Zhang · Applied Sciences · 2025
Multi-label text classification is a fundamental and important task in natural language processing, with widespread applications in specialized domains such as sentiment analysis, legal document classification, and medical coding. However, real-world applications often face challenges such as high annotation costs, data scarcity, and long-tailed label distributions. These issues are particularly pronounced in professional fields like healthcare and law, significantly limiting the performance of classification models. This paper focuses on the topic of few-shot multi-label text classification and provides a systematic survey of current research progress and mainstream techniques. From multiple perspectives, including modeling under few-shot settings, research status, technical approaches, commonly used datasets, and evaluation metrics, this study comprehensively reviews the existing literature and advances. At the technical level, the methods are broadly categorized into data augmentation and model training. The latter includes paradigms such as transfer learning, prompt learning, metric learning, meta-learning, graph neural networks, and attention mechanisms. In addition, this survey explores the research and progress of specific tasks under few-shot multi-label scenarios, such as multi-label aspect category detection, multi-label intent detection, and hierarchical multi-label text classification. In terms of experimental resources, this review compiles commonly used datasets along with their characteristics and categorizes evaluation metrics that are widely adopted in few-shot multi-label classification settings. Finally, it discusses the key research challenges and outlines future directions, offering insights to guide further investigation in this field.