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ZeroShotDataAug: Generating and Augmenting Training Data with ChatGPT

Paper · 2023 · Solomon Ubani, Suleyman Olcay Polat and Rodney Nielsen

Summary

The paper asks whether ChatGPT, prompted without any examples, can supply useful synthetic training data for text classification when labelled data is very scarce. The authors write one short, hand-crafted instruction per class, based on the task, the label description and a handful of training items. Each instruction asks the model to produce 20 new sentences for that class. They test this on SST-2 (Stanford Sentiment Treebank), SNIPS and TREC, keeping only 10 labelled examples per class for training and for development. The zero-shot ChatGPT data is compared with EDA, back-translation, several BERT/GPT-2/BART-based augmenters and few-shot ChatGPT paraphrasing. The zero-shot approach gives the highest accuracy on SST-2 and TREC and essentially ties few-shot ChatGPT on SNIPS. It also keeps improving as more synthetic examples are added. To rule out memorisation, the authors measure how similar the generated text is to the original train and test splits. The work matters because it offers a cheap way to bootstrap classifiers even when no annotated data exists.

Key points

  • Accuracy: ChatGPTzero-shot reached 78.1 on SST-2, 91.2 on SNIPS and 75.3 on TREC. The strongest non-ChatGPT baselines scored 58.0 (BARTword), 87.2 and 67.3 (BARTspan), so the gains are about 20, 4 and 8 points. Few-shot ChatGPT scored 69.6, 91.3 and 66.7.
  • Stability: All runs were repeated 15 times. The zero-shot method showed the smallest variance on SNIPS and TREC.
  • Scaling with more synthetic data: On SST-2, it outperformed every other augmenter at each tested ratio of 1 to 32 synthetic examples per original example, with slower diminishing returns.
  • No original training data: Trained only on generated data, the models scored 0.80 on SST-2, 0.78 on SNIPS and 0.62 on TREC. The SST-2 result beats all augmentation baselines that also had real data.
  • Contamination check: The authors used three similarity measures against the train and test sets: MiniLM sentence-embedding cosine, TF-IDF cosine and percent word overlap. Very few generated items were highly similar, which argues against memorisation. A noted limitation is that prompt design is manual and requires expertise.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Fields, topics and concepts

Cite

Cite as Solomon Ubani, Suleyman Olcay Polat and Rodney Nielsen. 2023. ZeroShotDataAug: Generating and Augmenting Training Data with ChatGPT. arXiv:2304.14334.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.48550/arxiv.2304.14334 · arXiv 2304.14334

@misc{ubani2023zeroshotdataaug,
  title = {{ZeroShotDataAug: Generating and Augmenting Training Data with ChatGPT}},
  author = {Solomon Ubani, Suleyman Olcay Polat and Rodney Nielsen},
  year = {2023},
  doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2304.14334},
  eprint = {2304.14334},
  archivePrefix = {arXiv},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2304.14334}
}

References

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