AEDA: An Easier Data Augmentation Technique for Text Classification

Akbar Karimi, Leonardo Rossi, Andrea Prati


Abstract
This paper proposes AEDA (An Easier Data Augmentation) technique to help improve the performance on text classification tasks. AEDA includes only random insertion of punctuation marks into the original text. This is an easier technique to implement for data augmentation than EDA method (Wei and Zou, 2019) with which we compare our results. In addition, it keeps the order of the words while changing their positions in the sentence leading to a better generalized performance. Furthermore, the deletion operation in EDA can cause loss of information which, in turn, misleads the network, whereas AEDA preserves all the input information. Following the baseline, we perform experiments on five different datasets for text classification. We show that using the AEDA-augmented data for training, the models show superior performance compared to using the EDA-augmented data in all five datasets. The source code will be made available for further study and reproduction of the results.
Anthology ID:
2021.findings-emnlp.234
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2021
Month:
November
Year:
2021
Address:
Punta Cana, Dominican Republic
Editors:
Marie-Francine Moens, Xuanjing Huang, Lucia Specia, Scott Wen-tau Yih
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2748–2754
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.findings-emnlp.234
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.findings-emnlp.234
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Akbar Karimi, Leonardo Rossi, and Andrea Prati. 2021. AEDA: An Easier Data Augmentation Technique for Text Classification. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2021, pages 2748–2754, Punta Cana, Dominican Republic. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
AEDA: An Easier Data Augmentation Technique for Text Classification (Karimi et al., Findings 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.findings-emnlp.234.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2021.findings-emnlp.234.mp4
Code
 akkarimi/aeda_nlp