Luo Kaiwei
2024
PPDAC: A Plug-and -Play Data Augmentation Component for Few-shot Extractive Question Answering
Huang Qi
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Fu Han
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Luo Wenbin
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Wang Mingwen
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Luo Kaiwei
Proceedings of the 23rd Chinese National Conference on Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Main Conference)
“Extractive Question Answering (EQA) in the few-shot learning scenario is one of the most chal-lenging tasks of Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC). Some previous works employ exter-nal knowledge for data augmentation to improve the performance of few-shot extractive ques-tion answering. However, there are not always available external knowledge or language- anddomain-specific NLP tools to deal with external knowledge such as part-of-speech taggers, syn-tactic parsers, and named-entity recognizers. In this paper, we present a novel Plug-and-PlayData Augmentation Component (PPDAC) for the few-shot extractive question answering, whichincludes a paraphrase generator and a paraphrase selector. Specifically, we generate multipleparaphrases of the question in the (question, passage, answer) triples using the paraphrase gener-ator and then obtain highly similar statements via paraphrase selector to form more training datafor fine-tuning. Extensive experiments on multiple EQA datasets show that our proposed plug-and-play data augmentation component significantly improves question-answering performance,and consistently outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in few-shot settings by a large margin.”