GDA: Grammar-based Data Augmentation for Text Classification using Slot Information

Joonghyuk Hahn, Hyunjoon Cheon, Elizabeth Orwig, Su-Hyeon Kim, Sang-Ki Ko, Yo-Sub Han


Abstract
Recent studies propose various data augmentation approaches to resolve the low-resource problem in natural language processing tasks. Data augmentation is a successful solution to this problem and recent strategies give variation on sentence structures to boost performance. However, these approaches can potentially lead to semantic errors and produce semantically noisy data due to the unregulated variation of sentence structures. In an effort to combat these semantic errors, we leverage slot information, the representation of the context of keywords from a sentence, and form a data augmentation strategy which we propose, called GDA. Our strategy employs algorithms that construct and manipulate rules of context-aware grammar, utilizing this slot information. The algorithms extract recurrent patterns by distinguishing words with slots and form the “rules of grammar”—a set of injective relations between a sentence’s semantics and its syntactical structure—to augment the dataset. The augmentation is done in an automated manner with the constructed rules and thus, GDA is explainable and reliable without any human intervention. We evaluate GDA with state-of-the-art data augmentation techniques, including those using pre-trained language models, and the result illustrates that GDA outperforms all other data augmentation methods by 19.38%. Extensive experiments show that GDA is an effective data augmentation strategy that incorporates word semantics for more accurate and diverse data.
Anthology ID:
2023.findings-emnlp.486
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
7291–7306
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.486
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.findings-emnlp.486
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Joonghyuk Hahn, Hyunjoon Cheon, Elizabeth Orwig, Su-Hyeon Kim, Sang-Ki Ko, and Yo-Sub Han. 2023. GDA: Grammar-based Data Augmentation for Text Classification using Slot Information. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023, pages 7291–7306, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
GDA: Grammar-based Data Augmentation for Text Classification using Slot Information (Hahn et al., Findings 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.486.pdf