EDA: Easy Data Augmentation Techniques for Boosting Performance on Text Classification Tasks

Feb 08, 2020 NLU Comments

EDA consists of four simple but powerful operations: synonym replacement, random insertion, random swap, and random deletion.
Training with EDA while using only 50% of the available training set achieved the same accuracy as normal training with all available data.

Synonym Replacement (SR): Randomly choose n words from the sentence that are not stop words. Replace each of these words with one of its synonyms chosen at random.
Random Insertion (RI): Find a random synonym of a random word in the sentence that is not a stop word. Insert that synonym into a random position in the sentence. Do this n times.
Random Swap (RS): Randomly choose two words in the sentence and swap their positions. Do this n times.
Random Deletion (RD): Randomly remove each word in the sentence with probability p.