FlipDA: Effective and Robust Data Augmentation for Few-Shot Learning
Jing Zhou, Yanan Zheng, Jie Tang, Jian Li, Zhilin Yang · Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2022
Most previous methods for text data augmentation are limited to simple tasks and weak baselines.We explore data augmentation on hard tasks (i.e., few-shot natural language understanding) and strong baselines (i.e., pretrained models with over one billion parameters).Under this setting, we reproduced a large number of previous augmentation methods and found that these methods bring marginal gains at best and sometimes degrade the performance much.To address this challenge, we propose a novel data augmentation method FlipDA that jointly uses a generative model and a classifier to generate label-flipped data.Central to the idea of FlipDA is the discovery that generating labelflipped data is more crucial to the performance than generating label-preserved data.Experiments show that FlipDA achieves a good tradeoff between effectiveness and robustness-it substantially improves many tasks while not negatively affecting the others. 1