# Data Augmentation Approaches in Natural Language Processing: A Survey

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.01852 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.01852/

## Key facts

- Cited by 82 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 103 of its 156 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Oct 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 103)

- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [mixup: Beyond Empirical Risk Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.09412/) (2017)
- [DistilBERT, a distilled version of BERT: smaller, faster, cheaper and lighter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.01108/) (2019)
- [Distributed Representations of Words and Phrases and their Compositionality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1310.4546/) (2013)
- [Character-level Convolutional Networks for Text Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1509.01626/) (2015)
- [TinyBERT: Distilling BERT for Natural Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.10351/) (2019)
- [Unsupervised Data Augmentation for Consistency Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.12848/) (2019)
- [EDA: Easy Data Augmentation Techniques for Boosting Performance on Text Classification Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.11196/) (2019)
- [Generalization through Memorization: Nearest Neighbor Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.00172/) (2019)
- [Improving Neural Machine Translation Models with Monolingual Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.06709/) (2015)
- [A Survey of Data Augmentation Approaches for NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.03075/) (2021)
- [Internet-Augmented Dialogue Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.07566/) (2021)
- [Contextual Augmentation: Data Augmentation by Words with Paradigmatic Relations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.06201/) (2018)
- [Counterfactual Data Augmentation for Mitigating Gender Stereotypes in Languages with Rich Morphology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.04571/) (2019)
- [Not Enough Data? Deep Learning to the Rescue!](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.03118/) (2019)
- [Data Augmentation using Pre-trained Transformer Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.02245/) (2020)
- [QANet: Combining Local Convolution with Global Self-Attention for Reading Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.09541/) (2018)
- [Good-Enough Compositional Data Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09545/) (2019)
- [Data Augmentation for Low-Resource Neural Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.00440/) (2017)
- [Augmented SBERT: Data Augmentation Method for Improving Bi-Encoders for Pairwise Sentence Scoring Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.08240/) (2020)
- [End-to-End Training of Multi-Document Reader and Retriever for Open-Domain Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.05346/) (2021)
- [Augmenting Data with Mixup for Sentence Classification: An Empirical Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.08941/) (2019)
- [A Survey on Data Augmentation for Text Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03158/) (2021)
- [Conditional BERT Contextual Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.06705/) (2018)
- [A Kernel Theory of Modern Data Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.06084/) (2018)
- [Robust Neural Machine Translation with Doubly Adversarial Inputs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.02443/) (2019)
- [SSMBA: Self-Supervised Manifold Based Data Augmentation for Improving Out-of-Domain Robustness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.10195/) (2020)
- [Self-training Improves Pre-training for Natural Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02194/) (2020)
- [Regularization for Deep Learning: A Taxonomy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10686/) (2017)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 82)

- [Survey of Hallucination in Natural Language Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.03629/) (2022)
- [The Curious Decline of Linguistic Diversity: Training Language Models on Synthetic Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.09807/) (2023)
- [A Survey of GPT-3 Family Large Language Models Including ChatGPT and GPT-4](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.12321/) (2023)
- [ReLLa: Retrieval-enhanced Large Language Models for Lifelong Sequential Behavior Comprehension in Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.11131/) (2023)
- [A Survey of Mathematical Reasoning in the Era of Multimodal Large Language Model: Benchmark, Method & Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.11936/) (2024)
- [A Survey of Mix-based Data Augmentation: Taxonomy, Methods, Applications, and Explainability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10888/) (2022)
- [Let's Synthesize Step by Step: Iterative Dataset Synthesis with Large Language Models by Extrapolating Errors from Small Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.13671/) (2023)
- [InternalInspector I2: Robust Confidence Estimation in LLMs through Internal States](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.12053/) (2024)
- [Unleashing the Power of Data Tsunami: A Comprehensive Survey on Data Assessment and Selection for Instruction Tuning of Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.02085/) (2024)
- [A review of ensemble learning and data augmentation models for class imbalanced problems: combination, implementation and evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02858/) (2023)
- [Noise-Robust Fine-Tuning of Pretrained Language Models via External Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.01108/) (2023)
- [A Ship of Theseus: Curious Cases of Paraphrasing in LLM-Generated Texts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.08374/) (2023)
- [Text Data Augmentation for Large Language Models: A Comprehensive Survey of Methods, Challenges, and Opportunities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.18845/) (2025)
- [Using GPT-4 to Augment Unbalanced Data for Automatic Scoring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.18365/) (2023)
- [Semantic-Guided Generative Image Augmentation Method with Diffusion Models for Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.02070/) (2023)
- [Retrieval-Augmented Data Augmentation for Low-Resource Domain Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.13482/) (2024)
- [Data Generation Using Large Language Models for Text Classification: An Empirical Case Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.12813/) (2024)
- [GDA: Generative Data Augmentation Techniques for Relation Extraction Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16663/) (2023)
- [Face4RAG: Factual Consistency Evaluation for Retrieval Augmented Generation in Chinese](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.01080/) (2024)
- [Enhancing Abstractiveness of Summarization Models through Calibrated Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.13760/) (2023)
- [Advancing Post-OCR Correction: A Comparative Study of Synthetic Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.02253/) (2024)
- [Rephrasing natural text data with different languages and quality levels for Large Language Model pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.20796/) (2024)
- [PromptDA: Label-guided Data Augmentation for Prompt-based Few-shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.09229/) (2022)
- [An Efficient Framework for Few-shot Skeleton-based Temporal Action Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.09925/) (2022)
- [FactMix: Using a Few Labeled In-domain Examples to Generalize to Cross-domain Named Entity Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.11464/) (2022)
- [A Survey on Table-and-Text HybridQA: Concepts, Methods, Challenges and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.13465/) (2022)
- [A Survey on Data Quality Dimensions and Tools for Machine Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.19614/) (2024)
- [Entity-to-Text based Data Augmentation for various Named Entity Recognition Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.10343/) (2022)
- [Data Optimization in Deep Learning: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.16499/) (2023)
- [Target-Side Augmentation for Document-Level Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.04505/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

As an effective strategy, data augmentation (DA) alleviates data scarcity scenarios where deep learning techniques may fail. It is widely applied in computer vision then introduced to natural language processing and achieves improvements in many tasks. One of the main focuses of the DA methods is to improve the diversity of training data, thereby helping the model to better generalize to unseen testing data. In this survey, we frame DA methods into three categories based on the diversity of augmented data, including paraphrasing, noising, and sampling. Our paper sets out to analyze DA methods in detail according to the above categories. Further, we also introduce their applications in NLP tasks as well as the challenges. Some helpful resources are provided in the appendix.