A Survey on Data Augmentation for Text Classification

Data augmentation, the artificial creation of training data for machine learning by transformations, is a widely studied research field across machine learning disciplines. While it is useful for increasing a model's generalization capabilities, it can also address many other challenges and problems, from overcoming a limited amount of training data to regularizing the objective, to limiting the amount of data used to protect privacy. Based on a precise description of the goals and applications of data augmentation and a taxonomy for existing works, this survey is concerned with data augmentation methods for textual classification and aims at providing a concise and comprehensive overview for researchers and…