Insufficient or even unavailable training data of emerging classes is a big
challenge of many classification tasks, including text classification.
Recognising text documents of classes that have never been seen in the learning
stage, so-called zero-shot text classification, is therefore difficult and only
limited previous works tackled this problem. In this paper, we propose a
two-phase framework together with data augmentation and feature augmentation to
solve this problem. Four kinds of semantic knowledge (word embeddings, class
descriptions, class hierarchy, and a general knowledge graph) are incorporated
into the proposed framework to deal with instances of unseen classes
effectively. Experimental results show that each and the combination of the two
phases achieve the best overall accuracy compared with baselines and recent
approaches in classifying real-world texts under the zero-shot scenario.