NL-Augmenter: A Framework for Task-Sensitive Natural Language Augmentation
This provides a tool for NLP researchers and practitioners to enhance model robustness and data diversity, though it is incremental as it builds on existing augmentation concepts.
The authors tackled the problem of data augmentation in NLP by introducing NL-Augmenter, a participatory Python framework that includes 117 transformations and 23 filters for various tasks, and demonstrated its efficacy by analyzing the robustness of popular models.
Data augmentation is an important component in the robustness evaluation of models in natural language processing (NLP) and in enhancing the diversity of the data they are trained on. In this paper, we present NL-Augmenter, a new participatory Python-based natural language augmentation framework which supports the creation of both 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 natural language tasks. We demonstrate the efficacy of NL-Augmenter by using several of its transformations to analyze the robustness of popular natural language models. The infrastructure, datacards and robustness analysis results are available publicly on the NL-Augmenter repository (https://github.com/GEM-benchmark/NL-Augmenter).