Kedi Chen, Dezhao Ruan, Yuhao Dan, Yaoting Wang, Siyu Yan, Xuecheng Wu, Yinqi Zhang, Qin Chen, Jie Zhou, Liang He, Biqing Qi, Linyang Li, Qipeng Guo, Xiaoming Shi, Wei Zhang. Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2026.

Zero-shot text classification (ZSTC) poses a big challenge due to the lack of labeled data for unseen classes during training. Most studies focus on transferring knowledge from seen classes to unseen classes, which have achieved good performance in most cases. Whereas, it is difficult to transfer knowledge when the classes have semantic gaps or low similarities. In this paper, we propose a prompt-based method, which enhances semantic understanding for each class and learns the matching between texts and classes for better ZSTC. Specifically, we first generate discriminative words for class description with prompt inserting (PIN). Then, a prompt matching (POM) model is learned to determine whether the text can well match the class description. Experiments on three benchmark datasets show the great advantages of our proposed method. In particular, we achieve the state-of-the-art performance on the unseen classes, while maintaining comparable strength with the existing ZSTC approaches regarding to the seen classes.

SUMMARY: Bisulfite sequencing (BS-seq) is currently the gold standard for measuring genome-wide DNA methylation profiles at single-nucleotide resolution. Most analyses focus on mean CpG methylation and ignore methylation states on the same DNA fragments [DNA methylation haplotypes (mHaps)]. Here, we propose mHap, a simple DNA mHap format for storing DNA BS-seq data. This format reduces the size of a BAM file by 40- to 140-fold while retaining complete read-level CpG methylation information. It is also compatible with the Tabix tool for fast and random access. We implemented a command-line tool, mHapTools, for converting BAM/SAM files from existing platforms to mHap files as well as post-processing DNA methylation data in mHap format. With this tool, we processed all publicly available human reduced representation bisulfite sequencing data and provided these data as a comprehensive mHap database. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: https://jiantaoshi.github.io/mHap/index.html. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.