Learning an Efficient Text Augmentation Strategy: A Case Study in Sentiment Analysis

Contemporary machine learning models, like deep neural networks, require substantial labeled datasets for proper training. However, in areas such as natural language processing, a shortage of labeled data can lead to overfitting. To address this challenge, data augmentation, which involves transforming data points to maintain class labels and provide additional valuable information, has become an effective strategy. In this paper, a deep reinforcement learning-based text augmentation method for sentiment analysis was introduced, combining reinforcement learning with deep learning. The technique uses Deep Q-Network (DQN) as the reinforcement learning method to search for an efficient augmentation strategy, employing four text augmentation transformations: random deletion, synonym replacement, random swapping, and random insertion. Additionally, various deep learning networks, including CNN, Bi-LSTM, Transformer, BERT, and XLNet, were evaluated for the training phase. Experimental findings show that the proposed technique can achieve an accuracy of 65.1% with only 20% of the dataset and 69.3% with 40% of the dataset. Furthermore, with just 10% of the dataset, the method yields an F1-score of 62.1%, rising to 69.1% with 40% of the dataset, outperforming previous approaches. Evaluation on the SemEval dataset demonstrates that reinforcement learning can efficiently augment text datasets for improved sentiment analysis results.