# SDA: Simple Discrete Augmentation for Contrastive Sentence Representation Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.03963 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03963/

## Key facts

- Cited by 8 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 33 of its 51 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Oct 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 33)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11401/) (2020)
- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03748/) (2018)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [A Broad-Coverage Challenge Corpus for Sentence Understanding through Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.05426/) (2017)
- [DeBERTa: Decoding-enhanced BERT with Disentangled Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.03654/) (2020)
- [SimCSE: Simple Contrastive Learning of Sentence Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08821/) (2021)
- [Understanding Contrastive Representation Learning through Alignment and Uniformity on the Hypersphere](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.10242/) (2020)
- [Learning deep representations by mutual information estimation and maximization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.06670/) (2018)
- [What Makes for Good Views for Contrastive Learning?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.10243/) (2020)
- [EDA: Easy Data Augmentation Techniques for Boosting Performance on Text Classification Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.11196/) (2019)
- [MINE: Mutual Information Neural Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04062/) (2018)
- [Contrastive Multi-View Representation Learning on Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.05582/) (2020)
- [Deep Graph Contrastive Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.04131/) (2020)
- [Supervised Learning of Universal Sentence Representations from Natural Language Inference Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.02364/) (2017)
- [DeCLUTR: Deep Contrastive Learning for Unsupervised Textual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.03659/) (2020)
- [ConSERT: A Contrastive Framework for Self-Supervised Sentence Representation Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.11741/) (2021)
- [Whitening Sentence Representations for Better Semantics and Faster Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15316/) (2021)
- [CLEAR: Contrastive Learning for Sentence Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15466/) (2020)
- [DiffCSE: Difference-based Contrastive Learning for Sentence Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.10298/) (2022)
- [COCO-LM: Correcting and Contrasting Text Sequences for Language Model Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.08473/) (2021)
- [Can contrastive learning avoid shortcut solutions?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.11230/) (2021)
- [Self-Guided Contrastive Learning for BERT Sentence Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.07345/) (2021)
- [An Unsupervised Sentence Embedding Method by Mutual Information Maximization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.12061/) (2020)
- [ESimCSE: Enhanced Sample Building Method for Contrastive Learning of Unsupervised Sentence Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.04380/) (2021)
- [SNCSE: Contrastive Learning for Unsupervised Sentence Embedding with Soft Negative Samples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.05979/) (2022)
- [HiddenCut: Simple Data Augmentation for Natural Language Understanding with Better Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.00149/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [Divide-Then-Aggregate: An Efficient Tool Learning Method via Parallel Tool Invocation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.12432/) (2025)
- [PUnifiedNER: A Prompting-based Unified NER System for Diverse Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.14838/) (2022)
- [Large Language Models for Zero-Shot Multicultural Name Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.04149/) (2025)
- [LumiGen: An LVLM-Enhanced Iterative Framework for Fine-Grained Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.04732/) (2025)
- [LVLM-Composer's Explicit Planning for Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.04152/) (2025)
- [VisuCraft: Enhancing Large Vision-Language Models for Complex Visual-Guided Creative Content Generation via Structured Information Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.02890/) (2025)
- [MM-FusionNet: Context-Aware Dynamic Fusion for Multi-modal Fake News Detection with Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.05684/) (2025)
- [ContextGuard-LVLM: Enhancing News Veracity through Fine-grained Cross-modal Contextual Consistency Verification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.06623/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Contrastive learning has recently achieved compelling performance in unsupervised sentence representation. As an essential element, data augmentation protocols, however, have not been well explored. The pioneering work SimCSE resorting to a simple dropout mechanism (viewed as continuous augmentation) surprisingly dominates discrete augmentations such as cropping, word deletion, and synonym replacement as reported. To understand the underlying rationales, we revisit existing approaches and attempt to hypothesize the desiderata of reasonable data augmentation methods: balance of semantic consistency and expression diversity. We then develop three simple yet effective discrete sentence augmentation schemes: punctuation insertion, modal verbs, and double negation. They act as minimal noises at lexical level to produce diverse forms of sentences. Furthermore, standard negation is capitalized on to generate negative samples for alleviating feature suppression involved in contrastive learning. We experimented extensively with semantic textual similarity on diverse datasets. The results support the superiority of the proposed methods consistently. Our key code is available at https://github.com/Zhudongsheng75/SDA