Data augmentation is an important method for evaluating the robustness of and enhancing the diversity of training data for natural language processing (NLP) models. In this paper, we present NL-Augmenter, a new participatory Python-based natural language (NL) augmentation framework which supports the creation of transformations (modifications to the data) and filters (data splits according to specific features). We describe the framework and an initial set of 117 transformations and 23 filters for a variety of NL tasks annotated with noisy descriptive tags. The transformations incorporate noise, intentional and accidental human mistakes, socio-linguistic variation, semantically-valid style, syntax changes, as well as artificial constructs that are unambiguous to humans. We demonstrate the efficacy of NL-Augmenter by using its transformations to analyze the robustness of popular language models. We find different models to be differently challenged on different tasks, with quasi-systematic score decreases. The infrastructure, datacards, and robustness evaluation results are publicly available on GitHub for the benefit of researchers working on paraphrase generation, robustness analysis, and low-resource NLP.

This paper describes the submission by NUIG-DSI to the GEM benchmark 2021. We participate in the modeling shared task where we submit outputs on four datasets for data-to-text generation, namely, DART, WebNLG (en), E2E and CommonGen. We follow an approach similar to the one described in the GEM benchmark paper where we use the pre-trained T5-base model for our submission. We train this model on additional monolingual data where we experiment with different masking strategies specifically focused on masking entities, predicates and concepts as well as a random masking strategy for pre-training. In our results we find that random masking performs the best in terms of automatic evaluation metrics, though the results are not statistically significantly different compared to other masking strategies.

Data-to-text generation has recently seen a move away from modular and pipeline architectures towards end-to-end architectures based on neural networks. In this work, we employ knowledge graph embeddings and explore their utility for end-to-end approaches in a data-to-text generation task. Our experiments show that using knowledge graph embeddings can yield an improvement of up to 2 – 3 BLEU points for seen categories on the WebNLG corpus without modifying the underlying neural network architecture.

This paper describes the system submitted by NUIG-DSI to the WebNLG+ challenge 2020 in the RDF-to-text generation task for the English language. For this challenge, we leverage transfer learning by adopting the T5 model architecture for our submission and fine-tune the model on the WebNLG+ corpus. Our submission ranks among the top five systems for most of the automatic evaluation metrics achieving a BLEU score of 51.74 over all categories with scores of 58.23 and 45.57 across seen and unseen categories respectively.