Evaluating the Effectiveness of Data Augmentation for Emotion Classification in Low-Resource Settings

TL;DR

This study evaluates various data augmentation techniques for emotion classification in low-resource settings, finding Back Translation to be most effective in improving model performance and diversity.

Contribution

It provides a comparative analysis of data augmentation methods, highlighting the superior performance of Back Translation for emotion classification with limited data.

Findings

Back Translation outperforms autoencoder-based methods.

Generating multiple examples improves performance.

Back Translation produces the most diverse unigrams and trigrams.

Abstract

Data augmentation has the potential to improve the performance of machine learning models by increasing the amount of training data available. In this study, we evaluated the effectiveness of different data augmentation techniques for a multi-label emotion classification task using a low-resource dataset. Our results showed that Back Translation outperformed autoencoder-based approaches and that generating multiple examples per training instance led to further performance improvement. In addition, we found that Back Translation generated the most diverse set of unigrams and trigrams. These findings demonstrate the utility of Back Translation in enhancing the performance of emotion classification models in resource-limited situations.