GenAug: Data Augmentation for Finetuning Text Generators

Steven Y. Feng, Varun Gangal, Dongyeop Kang, Teruko Mitamura, Eduard Hovy


Abstract
In this paper, we investigate data augmentation for text generation, which we call GenAug. Text generation and language modeling are important tasks within natural language processing, and are especially challenging for low-data regimes. We propose and evaluate various augmentation methods, including some that incorporate external knowledge, for finetuning GPT-2 on a subset of Yelp Reviews. We also examine the relationship between the amount of augmentation and the quality of the generated text. We utilize several metrics that evaluate important aspects of the generated text including its diversity and fluency. Our experiments demonstrate that insertion of character-level synthetic noise and keyword replacement with hypernyms are effective augmentation methods, and that the quality of generations improves to a peak at approximately three times the amount of original data.
Anthology ID:
2020.deelio-1.4
Volume:
Proceedings of Deep Learning Inside Out (DeeLIO): The First Workshop on Knowledge Extraction and Integration for Deep Learning Architectures
Month:
November
Year:
2020
Address:
Online
Editors:
Eneko Agirre, Marianna Apidianaki, Ivan Vulić
Venue:
DeeLIO
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
29–42
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.deelio-1.4
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.deelio-1.4
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Steven Y. Feng, Varun Gangal, Dongyeop Kang, Teruko Mitamura, and Eduard Hovy. 2020. GenAug: Data Augmentation for Finetuning Text Generators. In Proceedings of Deep Learning Inside Out (DeeLIO): The First Workshop on Knowledge Extraction and Integration for Deep Learning Architectures, pages 29–42, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
GenAug: Data Augmentation for Finetuning Text Generators (Feng et al., DeeLIO 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.deelio-1.4.pdf
Video:
 https://slideslive.com/38939727
Code
 styfeng/GenAug +  additional community code
Data
WebText