In the rapidly evolving field of large language models (LLMs), data augmentation (DA) has emerged as a pivotal technique for enhancing model performance by diversifying training examples without the need for additional data collection. This survey explores the transformative impact of LLMs on DA, particularly addressing the unique challenges and opportunities they present in the context of natural language processing (NLP) and beyond. From both data and learning perspectives, we examine various strategies that utilize LLMs for data augmentation, including a novel exploration of learning paradigms where LLM-generated data is used for diverse forms of further training. Additionally, this paper highlights the primary open challenges faced in this domain, ranging from controllable data augmentation to multi-modal data augmentation. This survey highlights a paradigm shift introduced by LLMs in DA, and aims to serve as a comprehensive guide for researchers and practitioners.

Computational argumentation has become an essential tool in various domains, including law, public policy, and artificial intelligence. It is an emerging research field in natural language processing that attracts increasing attention. Research on computational argumentation mainly involves two types of tasks: argument mining and argument generation. As large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in understanding context and generating natural language, it is worthwhile to evaluate the performance of LLMs on diverse computational argumentation tasks. This work aims to embark on an assessment of LLMs, such as ChatGPT, Flan models, and LLaMA2 models, in both zero-shot and few-shot settings. We organize existing tasks into six main categories and standardize the format of fourteen openly available datasets. In addition, we present a new benchmark dataset on counter speech generation that aims to holistically evaluate the end-to-end performance of LLMs on argument mining and argument generation. Extensive experiments show that LLMs exhibit commendable performance across most of the datasets, demonstrating their capabilities in the field of argumentation. Our analysis offers valuable suggestions for evaluating computational argumentation and its integration with LLMs in future research endeavors.

Existing solutions to zero-shot text classification either conduct prompting with pre-trained language models, which is sensitive to the choices of templates, or rely on large-scale annotated data of relevant tasks for meta-tuning. In this work, we propose a new paradigm based on self-supervised learning to solve zero-shot text classification tasks by tuning the language models with unlabeled data, called self-supervised tuning. By exploring the inherent structure of free texts, we propose a new learning objective called first sentence prediction to bridge the gap between unlabeled data and text classification tasks. After tuning the model to learn to predict the first sentence in a paragraph based on the rest, the model is able to conduct zero-shot inference on unseen tasks such as topic classification and sentiment analysis. Experimental results show that our model outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines on 7 out of 10 tasks. Moreover, the analysis reveals that our model is less sensitive to the prompt design. Our code and pre-trained models are publicly available at https://github.com/DAMO-NLP-SG/SSTuning.