English

Not Enough Data? Deep Learning to the Rescue!

Computation and Language 2019-11-28 v2 Machine Learning

Abstract

Based on recent advances in natural language modeling and those in text generation capabilities, we propose a novel data augmentation method for text classification tasks. We use a powerful pre-trained neural network model to artificially synthesize new labeled data for supervised learning. We mainly focus on cases with scarce labeled data. Our method, referred to as language-model-based data augmentation (LAMBADA), involves fine-tuning a state-of-the-art language generator to a specific task through an initial training phase on the existing (usually small) labeled data. Using the fine-tuned model and given a class label, new sentences for the class are generated. Our process then filters these new sentences by using a classifier trained on the original data. In a series of experiments, we show that LAMBADA improves classifiers' performance on a variety of datasets. Moreover, LAMBADA significantly improves upon the state-of-the-art techniques for data augmentation, specifically those applicable to text classification tasks with little data.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1911.03118,
  title  = {Not Enough Data? Deep Learning to the Rescue!},
  author = {Ateret Anaby-Tavor and Boaz Carmeli and Esther Goldbraich and Amir Kantor and George Kour and Segev Shlomov and Naama Tepper and Naama Zwerdling},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1911.03118},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

20 pages

R2 v1 2026-06-23T12:09:00.667Z