Language model based pre-trained models such as BERT have provided significant gains across different NLP tasks. In this paper, we study different types of transformer based pre-trained models such as auto-regressive models (GPT-2), auto-encoder models (BERT), and seq2seq models (BART) for conditional data augmentation. We show that prepending the class labels to text sequences provides a simple yet effective way to condition the pre-trained models for data augmentation. Additionally, on three classification benchmarks, pre-trained Seq2Seq model outperforms other data augmentation methods in a low-resource setting. Further, we explore how different pre-trained model based data augmentation differs in-terms of data diversity, and how well such methods preserve the class-label information.
Lehigh University（理海大学）；University of Illinois at Chicago（伊利诺伊大学芝加哥分校）；Salesforce Research（赛富时研究院）；Hangzhou Dianzi University（杭州电子科技大学）
Mixup is the latest data augmentation technique that linearly interpolates input examples and the corresponding labels. It has shown strong effectiveness in image classification by interpolating images at the pixel level. Inspired by this line of research, in this paper, we explore i) how to apply mixup to natural language processing tasks since text data can hardly be mixed in the raw format; ii) if mixup is still effective in transformer-based learning models, e.g., BERT. To achieve the goal, we incorporate mixup to transformer-based pre-trained architecture, named "mixup-transformer", for a…
Data augmentation methods for Natural Language Processing tasks are explored in recent years, however they are limited and it is hard to capture the diversity on sentence level. Besides, it is not always possible to perform data augmentation on supervised tasks. To address those problems, we propose a neural data augmentation method, which is a combination of Conditional Variational Autoencoder and encoder-decoder Transformer model. While encoding and decoding the input sentence, our model captures the syntactic and semantic representation of the input language with its class condition. Follow…
This paper describes our participation in SemEval-2023 Task 9, Intimacy Analysis of Multilingual Tweets. We fine-tune some of the most popular transformer models with the training dataset and synthetic data generated by different data augmentation techniques. During the development phase, our best results were obtained by using XLM-T. Data augmentation techniques provide a very slight improvement in the results. Our system ranked in the 27th position out of the 45 participating systems. Despite its modest results, our system shows promising results in languages such as Portuguese, English, and…
Automated essay scoring is one of the most important problem in Natural Language Processing. It has been explored for a number of years, and it remains partially solved. In addition to its economic and educational usefulness, it presents research problems. Transfer learning has proved to be beneficial in NLP. Data augmentation techniques have also helped build state-of-the-art models for automated essay scoring. Many works in the past have attempted to solve this problem by using RNNs, LSTMs, etc. This work examines the transformer models like BERT, RoBERTa, etc. We empirically demonstrate the…
Tweets are specific text data when compared to general text. Although sentiment analysis over tweets has become very popular in the last decade for English, it is still difficult to find huge annotated corpora for non-English languages. The recent rise of the transformer models in Natural Language Processing allows to achieve unparalleled performances in many tasks, but these models need a consequent quantity of text to adapt to the tweet domain. We propose the use of a multilingual transformer model, that we pre-train over English tweets and apply data-augmentation using automatic translation…
This paper describes our participation in SemEval-2023 Task 10, whose goal is the detection of sexism in social media. We explore some of the most popular transformer models such as BERT, DistilBERT, RoBERTa, and XLNet. We also study different data augmentation techniques to increase the training dataset. During the development phase, our best results were obtained by using RoBERTa and data augmentation for tasks B and C. However, the use of synthetic data does not improve the results for task C. We participated in the three subtasks. Our approach still has much room for improvement, especiall…
Tel Aviv University（特拉维夫大学）；Allen Institute for AI（艾伦人工智能研究所）
Transformer-based models have become ubiquitous in natural language processing thanks to their large capacity, innate parallelism and high performance. The contextualizing component of a Transformer block is the $\textit{pairwise dot-product}$ attention that has a large $Ω(L^2)$ memory requirement for length $L$ sequences, limiting its ability to process long documents. This has been the subject of substantial interest recently, where multiple approximations were proposed to reduce the quadratic memory requirement using sparse attention matrices. In this work, we propose to augment sparse Tran…
The task of verbalization of RDF triples has known a growth in popularity due to the rising ubiquity of Knowledge Bases (KBs). The formalism of RDF triples is a simple and efficient way to store facts at a large scale. However, its abstract representation makes it difficult for humans to interpret. For this purpose, the WebNLG challenge aims at promoting automated RDF-to-text generation. We propose to leverage pre-trainings from augmented data with the Transformer model using a data augmentation strategy. Our experiment results show a minimum relative increases of 3.73%, 126.05% and 88.16% in …
Newly-introduced deep learning architectures, namely BERT, XLNet, RoBERTa and ALBERT, have been proved to be robust on several NLP tasks. However, the datasets trained on these architectures are fixed in terms of size and generalizability. To relieve this issue, we apply one of the most inexpensive solutions to update these datasets. We call this approach BET by which we analyze the backtranslation data augmentation on the transformer-based architectures. Using the Google Translate API with ten intermediary languages from ten different language families, we externally evaluate the results in t…
Budapest University of Technology and Economics（布达佩斯技术与经济大学）；SpeechTex Ltd.（SpeechTex有限公司）；THINKTech Research Center（THINKTech研究中心）
Recently Deep Transformer models have proven to be particularly powerful in language modeling tasks for ASR. Their high complexity, however, makes them very difficult to apply in the first (single) pass of an online system. Recent studies showed that a considerable part of the knowledge of neural network Language Models (LM) can be transferred to traditional n-grams by using neural text generation based data augmentation. In our paper, we pre-train a GPT-2 Transformer LM on a general text corpus and fine-tune it on our Hungarian conversational call center ASR task. We show that although data a…
This paper describes our winning systems in MRL: The 1st Shared Task on Multilingual Clause-level Morphology (EMNLP 2022 Workshop) designed by KUIS AI NLP team. We present our work for all three parts of the shared task: inflection, reinflection, and analysis. We mainly explore transformers with two approaches: (i) training models from scratch in combination with data augmentation, and (ii) transfer learning with prefix-tuning at multilingual morphological tasks. Data augmentation significantly improves performance for most languages in the inflection and reinflection tasks. On the other hand,…
Data augmentation promises to alleviate data scarcity. This is most important in cases where the initial data is in short supply. This is, for existing methods, also where augmenting is the most difficult, as learning the full data distribution is impossible. For natural language, sentence editing offers a solution - relying on small but meaningful changes to the original ones. Learning which changes are meaningful also requires large amounts of training data. We thus aim to learn this in a source domain where data is abundant and apply it in a different, target domain, where data is scarce - …
Tsinghua University（清华大学）；University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）；Microsoft Research（微软研究院）；Peking University（北京大学）
Transformers are widely used in NLP tasks. However, current approaches to leveraging transformers to understand language expose one weak spot: Number understanding. In some scenarios, numbers frequently occur, especially in semi-structured data like tables. But current approaches to rich-number tasks with transformer-based language models abandon or lose some of the numeracy information - e.g., breaking numbers into sub-word tokens - which leads to many number-related errors. In this paper, we propose the LUNA framework which improves the numerical reasoning and calculation capabilities of tra…
This paper describes our submission to SemEval-2022 Task 6 on sarcasm detection and its five subtasks for English and Arabic. Sarcasm conveys a meaning which contradicts the literal meaning, and it is mainly found on social networks. It has a significant role in understanding the intention of the user. For detecting sarcasm, we used deep learning techniques based on transformers due to its success in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP) without the need for feature engineering. The datasets were taken from tweets. We created new datasets by augmenting with external data or by using w…
Department of Automation and Applied Informatics（自动化与应用信息学系）；Budapest University of Technology and Economics（布达佩斯技术与经济大学）；Eötvös Loránd Research Network（厄特沃什·罗兰研究网络）；Institute for Computer Science and Control（计算机科学与控制研究所）
We train Transformer-based neural machine translation models for Hungarian-English and English-Hungarian using the Hunglish2 corpus. Our best models achieve a BLEU score of 40.0 on HungarianEnglish and 33.4 on English-Hungarian. Furthermore, we present results on an ongoing work about syntax-based augmentation for neural machine translation. Both our code and models are publicly available.
Twitter and, in general, social media has become an indispensable communication channel in times of emergency. The ubiquitousness of smartphone gadgets enables people to declare an emergency observed in real-time. As a result, more agencies are interested in programmatically monitoring Twitter (disaster relief organizations and news agencies). Therefore, recognizing the informativeness of a Tweet can help filter noise from the large volumes of Tweets. In this paper, we present our submission for WNUT-2020 Task 2: Identification of informative COVID-19 English Tweets. Our most successful model …
The University of Texas at Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）；Google AI Language（谷歌人工智能语言团队）
Paraphrasing is rooted in semantics. We show the effectiveness of transformers (Vaswani et al. 2017) for paraphrase generation and further improvements by incorporating PropBank labels via a multi-encoder. Evaluating on MSCOCO and WikiAnswers, we find that transformers are fast and effective, and that semantic augmentation for both transformers and LSTMs leads to sizable 2-3 point gains in BLEU, METEOR and TER. More importantly, we find surprisingly large gains on human evaluations compared to previous models. Nevertheless, manual inspection of generated paraphrases reveals ample room for impr…
University of Zagreb, Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing（萨格勒布大学电气工程与计算学院）；Text Analysis and Knowledge Engineering Lab（文本分析与知识工程实验室）
Data scarcity is a problem that occurs in languages and tasks where we do not have large amounts of labeled data but want to use state-of-the-art models. Such models are often deep learning models that require a significant amount of data to train. Acquiring data for various machine learning problems is accompanied by high labeling costs. Data augmentation is a low-cost approach for tackling data scarcity. This paper gives an overview of current state-of-the-art data augmentation methods used for natural language processing, with an emphasis on methods for neural and transformer-based models. …
Harvard University（哈佛大学）；MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab（麻省理工学院-IBM沃森人工智能实验室）；Cornell University（康奈尔大学）
Despite their empirical success, neural networks still have difficulty capturing compositional aspects of natural language. This work proposes a simple data augmentation approach to encourage compositional behavior in neural models for sequence-to-sequence problems. Our approach, SeqMix, creates new synthetic examples by softly combining input/output sequences from the training set. We connect this approach to existing techniques such as SwitchOut and word dropout, and show that these techniques are all approximating variants of a single objective. SeqMix consistently yields approximately 1.0 …
Helmholtz Zentrum München（慕尼黑亥姆霍兹中心）；BigChem GmbH（大化学股份有限公司）；Firmenich International SA（芬美意国际股份有限公司）
We present SMILES-embeddings derived from the internal encoder state of a Transformer [1] model trained to canonize SMILES as a Seq2Seq problem. Using a CharNN [2] architecture upon the embeddings results in higher quality interpretable QSAR/QSPR models on diverse benchmark datasets including regression and classification tasks. The proposed Transformer-CNN method uses SMILES augmentation for training and inference, and thus the prognosis is based on an internal consensus. That both the augmentation and transfer learning are based on embeddings allows the method to provide good results for sma…
Beijing Jiaotong University（北京交通大学）；Harbin Institute of Technology（哈尔滨工业大学）
Translation suggestion (TS) models are used to automatically provide alternative suggestions for incorrect spans in sentences generated by machine translation. This paper introduces the system used in our submission to the WMT'22 Translation Suggestion shared task. Our system is based on the ensemble of different translation architectures, including Transformer, SA-Transformer, and DynamicConv. We use three strategies to construct synthetic data from parallel corpora to compensate for the lack of supervised data. In addition, we introduce a multi-phase pre-training strategy, adding an addition…
The computational complexity of the self-attention mechanism in Transformer models significantly limits their ability to generalize over long temporal durations. Memory-augmentation, or the explicit storing of past information in external memory for subsequent predictions, has become a constructive avenue for mitigating this limitation. We argue that memory-augmented Transformers can benefit substantially from considering insights from the memory literature in humans. We detail an approach for integrating evidence from the human memory system through the specification of cross-domain linking h…
MixUp is a computer vision data augmentation technique that uses convex interpolations of input data and their labels to enhance model generalization during training. However, the application of MixUp to the natural language understanding (NLU) domain has been limited, due to the difficulty of interpolating text directly in the input space. In this study, we propose MixUp methods at the Input, Manifold, and sentence embedding levels for the transformer architecture, and apply them to finetune the BERT model for a diverse set of NLU tasks. We find that MixUp can improve model performance, as we…
Bosch Center for Artificial Intelligence（博世人工智能中心）；University of Sydney（悉尼大学）；CSIRO Data61（澳大利亚联邦科学与工业研究组织数据61中心）
Simple yet effective data augmentation techniques have been proposed for sentence-level and sentence-pair natural language processing tasks. Inspired by these efforts, we design and compare data augmentation for named entity recognition, which is usually modeled as a token-level sequence labeling problem. Through experiments on two data sets from the biomedical and materials science domains (i2b2-2010 and MaSciP), we show that simple augmentation can boost performance for both recurrent and transformer-based models, especially for small training sets.
Natural Language Processing (NLP) relies heavily on training data. Transformers, as they have gotten bigger, have required massive amounts of training data. To satisfy this requirement, text augmentation should be looked at as a way to expand your current dataset and to generalize your models. One text augmentation we will look at is translation augmentation. We take an English sentence and translate it to another language before translating it back to English. In this paper, we look at the effect of 108 different language back translations on various metrics and text embeddings.
In this work, we present the Chatbot Interaction with Artificial Intelligence (CI-AI) framework as an approach to the training of deep learning chatbots for task classification. The intelligent system augments human-sourced data via artificial paraphrasing in order to generate a large set of training data for further classical, attention, and language transformation-based learning approaches for Natural Language Processing. Human beings are asked to paraphrase commands and questions for task identification for further execution of a machine. The commands and questions are split into training a…
In Neural Machine Translation (NMT), data augmentation methods such as back-translation have proven their effectiveness in improving translation performance. In this paper, we propose a novel data augmentation approach for NMT, which is independent of any additional training data. Our approach, AdMix, consists of two parts: 1) introduce faint discrete noise (word replacement, word dropping, word swapping) into the original sentence pairs to form augmented samples; 2) generate new synthetic training data by softly mixing the augmented samples with their original samples in training corpus. Expe…
Data augmentation has proven widely effective in computer vision. In Natural Language Processing (NLP) data augmentation remains an area of active research. There is no widely accepted augmentation technique that works well across tasks and model architectures. In this paper we explore data augmentation techniques in the context of text classification using two social media datasets. We explore popular varieties of data augmentation, starting with oversampling, Easy Data Augmentation (Wei and Zou, 2019) and Back-Translation (Sennrich et al., 2015). We also consider Greyscaling, a relatively un…
We propose a novel data-augmentation technique for neural machine translation based on ROT-$k$ ciphertexts. ROT-$k$ is a simple letter substitution cipher that replaces a letter in the plaintext with the $k$th letter after it in the alphabet. We first generate multiple ROT-$k$ ciphertexts using different values of $k$ for the plaintext which is the source side of the parallel data. We then leverage this enciphered training data along with the original parallel data via multi-source training to improve neural machine translation. Our method, CipherDAug, uses a co-regularization-inspired trainin…
In this paper, we aim to build a robust question answering system that can adapt to out-of-domain datasets. A single network may overfit to the superficial correlation in the training distribution, but with a meaningful number of expert sub-networks, a gating network that selects a sparse combination of experts for each input, and careful balance on the importance of expert sub-networks, the Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) model allows us to train a multi-task learner that can be generalized to out-of-domain datasets. We also explore the possibility of bringing the MoE layers up to the middle of the …
LLMCARE: early detection of cognitive impairment via transformer models enhanced by LLM-generated synthetic data
Columbia University Irving Medical Center（哥伦比亚大学欧文医学中心）；University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee（威斯康星大学密尔沃基分校）；University of Tehran（德黑兰大学）；Columbia University（哥伦比亚大学）；University of Florida（佛罗里达大学）
Budapest University of Technology and Economics（布达佩斯技术与经济大学）
We present the BME submission for the SIGMORPHON 2021 Task 0 Part 1, Generalization Across Typologically Diverse Languages shared task. We use an LSTM encoder-decoder model with three step training that is first trained on all languages, then fine-tuned on each language families and finally finetuned on individual languages. We use a different type of data augmentation technique in the first two steps. Our system outperformed the only other submission. Although it remains worse than the Transformer baseline released by the organizers, our model is simpler and our data augmentation techniques a…
College of Computer Science, Sichuan University（四川大学计算机学院）；Microsoft Research Asia（微软亚洲研究院）；Mila（米拉）；Microsoft（微软）
In this paper, we propose a novel data augmentation method, referred to as Controllable Rewriting based Question Data Augmentation (CRQDA), for machine reading comprehension (MRC), question generation, and question-answering natural language inference tasks. We treat the question data augmentation task as a constrained question rewriting problem to generate context-relevant, high-quality, and diverse question data samples. CRQDA utilizes a Transformer autoencoder to map the original discrete question into a continuous embedding space. It then uses a pre-trained MRC model to revise the question…
Deterministic Reversible Data Augmentation for Neural Machine Translation
School of Computer Science and Technology, Beijing Institute of Technology（北京理工大学计算机科学与技术学院）；School of Computer Science and Engineering, Beihang University（北京航空航天大学计算机科学与工程学院）
Georgia Institute of Technology（佐治亚理工学院）；Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）
We present semi-supervised models with data augmentation (SMDA), a semi-supervised text classification system to classify interactive affective responses. SMDA utilizes recent transformer-based models to encode each sentence and employs back translation techniques to paraphrase given sentences as augmented data. For labeled sentences, we performed data augmentations to uniform the label distributions and computed supervised loss during training process. For unlabeled sentences, we explored self-training by regarding low-entropy predictions over unlabeled sentences as pseudo labels, assuming hi…
Sarcasm is a term that refers to the use of words to mock, irritate, or amuse someone. It is commonly used on social media. The metaphorical and creative nature of sarcasm presents a significant difficulty for sentiment analysis systems based on affective computing. The methodology and results of our team, UTNLP, in the SemEval-2022 shared task 6 on sarcasm detection are presented in this paper. We put different models, and data augmentation approaches to the test and report on which one works best. The tests begin with traditional machine learning models and progress to transformer-based and …
Text classification is a representative downstream task of natural language processing, and has exhibited excellent performance since the advent of pre-trained language models based on Transformer architecture. However, in pre-trained language models, under-fitting often occurs due to the size of the model being very large compared to the amount of available training data. Along with significant importance of data collection in modern machine learning paradigm, studies have been actively conducted for natural language data augmentation. In light of this, we introduce three data augmentation sc…
Athens University of Economics and Business（雅典经济与商业大学）；Institute for Language and Speech Processing, Research Center ‘Athena’（“雅典娜”研究中心语言与语音处理研究所）；Institute of Informatics and Telecommunications, NCSR ‘Demokritos’（国家科学研究中心“德谟克利特”信息与电信研究所）
We study the effect of seven data augmentation (da) methods in factoid question answering, focusing on the biomedical domain, where obtaining training instances is particularly difficult. We experiment with data from the BioASQ challenge, which we augment with training instances obtained from an artificial biomedical machine reading comprehension dataset, or via back-translation, information retrieval, word substitution based on word2vec embeddings, or masked language modeling, question generation, or extending the given passage with additional context. We show that da can lead to very signifi…
Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems are known to exhibit difficulties when transcribing children's speech. This can mainly be attributed to the absence of large children's speech corpora to train robust ASR models and the resulting domain mismatch when decoding children's speech with systems trained on adult data. In this paper, we propose multiple enhancements to alleviate these issues. First, we propose a data augmentation technique based on the source-filter model of speech to close the domain gap between adult and children's speech. This enables us to leverage the data availability …
Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所）；School of Artificial Intelligence, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学人工智能学院）；Institute for Interdisciplinary Information Sciences, Tsinghua University（清华大学交叉信息研究院）；Microsoft Research Asia（微软亚洲研究院）
In this paper, we propose MixSpeech, a simple yet effective data augmentation method based on mixup for automatic speech recognition (ASR). MixSpeech trains an ASR model by taking a weighted combination of two different speech features (e.g., mel-spectrograms or MFCC) as the input, and recognizing both text sequences, where the two recognition losses use the same combination weight. We apply MixSpeech on two popular end-to-end speech recognition models including LAS (Listen, Attend and Spell) and Transformer, and conduct experiments on several low-resource datasets including TIMIT, WSJ, and HK…
