Targeted Augmentation for Low-Resource Event Extraction

Abstract: Addressing the challenge of low-resource information extraction remains an ongoing issue due to the inherent information scarcity within limited training examples. Existing data augmentation methods, considered potential solutions, struggle to strike a balance between weak augmentation (e.g., synonym augmentation) and drastic augmentation (e.g., conditional generation without proper guidance). This paper introduces a novel paradigm that employs targeted augmentation and back validation to produce augmented examples with enhanced diversity, polarity, accuracy, and coherence. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed paradigm. Furthermore, identified limitations are discussed, shedding light on areas for future improvement.