A Survey on Recent Approaches for Natural Language Processing in Low-Resource Scenarios

Michael A. Hedderich, Lukas Lange, Heike Adel, Jannik Strötgen, Dietrich Klakow


Abstract
Deep neural networks and huge language models are becoming omnipresent in natural language applications. As they are known for requiring large amounts of training data, there is a growing body of work to improve the performance in low-resource settings. Motivated by the recent fundamental changes towards neural models and the popular pre-train and fine-tune paradigm, we survey promising approaches for low-resource natural language processing. After a discussion about the different dimensions of data availability, we give a structured overview of methods that enable learning when training data is sparse. This includes mechanisms to create additional labeled data like data augmentation and distant supervision as well as transfer learning settings that reduce the need for target supervision. A goal of our survey is to explain how these methods differ in their requirements as understanding them is essential for choosing a technique suited for a specific low-resource setting. Further key aspects of this work are to highlight open issues and to outline promising directions for future research.
Anthology ID:
2021.naacl-main.201
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies
Month:
June
Year:
2021
Address:
Online
Editors:
Kristina Toutanova, Anna Rumshisky, Luke Zettlemoyer, Dilek Hakkani-Tur, Iz Beltagy, Steven Bethard, Ryan Cotterell, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Yichao Zhou
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2545–2568
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.naacl-main.201
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.naacl-main.201
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Michael A. Hedderich, Lukas Lange, Heike Adel, Jannik Strötgen, and Dietrich Klakow. 2021. A Survey on Recent Approaches for Natural Language Processing in Low-Resource Scenarios. In Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, pages 2545–2568, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
A Survey on Recent Approaches for Natural Language Processing in Low-Resource Scenarios (Hedderich et al., NAACL 2021)
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