HiTeC: Hierarchical Contrastive Learning on Text-Attributed Hypergraph with Semantic-Aware Augmentation

Contrastive learning (CL) has become a dominant paradigm for self-supervised hypergraph learning, enabling effective training without costly labels. However, node entities in real-world hypergraphs are often associated with rich textual information, which has been largely ignored in prior works. Directly applying existing CL-based methods to such text-attributed hypergraphs (TAHGs) leads to three key limitations: (1) The common use of graph-agnostic text encoders fails to capture the correlations between textual semantics and hypergraph topology, resulting in less expressive representations. (2) Their reliance on random data augmentations introduces noise and weakens the contrastive signals. (3) The primary focus on node- and hyperedge-level contrastive signals limits the ability to capture long-range dependencies, which is essential for effective representation learning. To address these challenges, we introduce HiTeC, a two-stage hierarchical contrastive learning framework for effective self-supervised learning on TAHGs. In the first stage, we pre-train the text encoder with a structure-aware contrastive objective to overcome the graph-agnostic nature of conventional methods. In the second stage, we begin by introducing semantic-aware augmentations, including structure-contextualized text augmentation and semantic-aware hyperedge dropping, to facilitate informative view generation. Subsequently, we propose a multi-scale contrastive loss with an $s$-walk-based subgraph-level objective to capture long-range dependencies. Extensive experiments on six real-world datasets validate the effectiveness of our proposed method.