Meng Lin


2022

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Text Smoothing: Enhance Various Data Augmentation Methods on Text Classification Tasks
Xing Wu | Chaochen Gao | Meng Lin | Liangjun Zang | Songlin Hu
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)

Before entering the neural network, a token needs to be converted to its one-hot representation, which is a discrete distribution of the vocabulary. Smoothed representation is the probability of candidate tokens obtained from the pre-trained masked language model, which can be seen as a more informative augmented substitution to the one-hot representation. We propose an efficient data augmentation method, dub as text smoothing, by converting a sentence from its one-hot representation to controllable smoothed representation. We evaluate text smoothing on different datasets in a low-resource regime. Experimental results show that text smoothing outperforms various mainstream data augmentation methods by a substantial margin. Moreover, text smoothing can be combined with these data augmentation methods to achieve better performance.