Textual data augmentation (DA) is a prolific field of study where novel techniques to create artificial data are regularly proposed, and that has demonstrated great efficiency on small data settings, at least for text classification tasks. In this paper, we challenge those results, showing that classical data augmentation (which modify sentences) is simply a way of performing better fine-tuning, and that spending more time doing so before applying data augmentation negates its effect. This is a significant contribution as it answers several questions that were left open in recent years, namely : which DA technique performs best (all of them as long as they generate data close enough to the training set, as to not impair training) and why did DA show positive results (facilitates training of network). We further show that zero- and few-shot DA via conversational agents such as ChatGPT or LLama2 can increase performances, confirming that this form of data augmentation is preferable to classical methods.

Olivier Salaün, Frédéric Piedboeuf, Guillaume Le Berre, David Alfonso-Hermelo, Philippe Langlais. Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2024.

In recent years, data augmentation has become an important field of machine learning. While images can use simple techniques such as cropping or rotating, textual data augmentation needs more complex manipulations to ensure that the generated examples are useful. Variational auto-encoders (VAE) and its conditional variant the Conditional-VAE (CVAE) are often used to generate new textual data, both relying on a good enough training of the generator so that it doesn’t create examples of the wrong class. In this paper, we explore a simpler way to use VAE for data augmentation: the training of one VAE per class. We show on several dataset sizes, as well as on four different binary classification tasks, that it systematically outperforms other generative data augmentation techniques.

Keyphrases are an important tool for efficiently dealing with the ever-increasing amount of information present on the internet. While there are many recent papers on English keyphrase generation, keyphrase generation for other languages remains vastly understudied, mostly due to the absence of datasets. To address this, we present a novel dataset called Papyrus, composed of 16427 pairs of abstracts and keyphrases. We release four versions of this dataset, corresponding to different subtasks. Papyrus-e considers only English keyphrases, Papyrus-f considers French keyphrases, Papyrus-m considers keyphrase generation in any language (mostly French and English), and Papyrus-a considers keyphrase generation in several languages. We train a state-of-the-art model on all four tasks and show that they lead to better results for non-English languages, with an average improvement of 14.2\% on keyphrase extraction and 2.0\% on generation. We also show an improvement of 0.4\% on extraction and 0.7\% on generation over English state-of-the-art results by concatenating Papyrus-e with the Kp20K training set.