  Deep neural networks are gaining increasing popularity for the classic text
classification task, due to their strong expressive power and less requirement
for feature engineering. Despite such attractiveness, neural text
classification models suffer from the lack of training data in many real-world
applications. Although many semi-supervised and weakly-supervised text
classification models exist, they cannot be easily applied to deep neural
models and meanwhile support limited supervision types. In this paper, we
propose a weakly-supervised method that addresses the lack of training data in
neural text classification. Our method consists of two modules: (1) a
pseudo-document generator that leverages seed information to generate
pseudo-labeled documents for model pre-training, and (2) a self-training module
that bootstraps on real unlabeled data for model refinement. Our method has the
flexibility to handle different types of weak supervision and can be easily
integrated into existing deep neural models for text classification. We have
performed extensive experiments on three real-world datasets from different
domains. The results demonstrate that our proposed method achieves inspiring
performance without requiring excessive training data and outperforms baseline
methods significantly.
