Augmenter Recipes CommandLine Use

Transformations and constraints can be used for simple NLP data augmentations.

The examples/ folder includes scripts showing common TextAttack usage for training models, running attacks, and augmenting a CSV file.

The documentation website contains walkthroughs explaining basic usage of TextAttack, including building a custom transformation and a custom constraint..

Augmenting Text: textattack augment

Many of the components of TextAttack are useful for data augmentation. The textattack.Augmenter class uses a transformation and a list of constraints to augment data. We also offer built-in recipes for data augmentation:

  • wordnet augments text by replacing words with WordNet synonyms

  • embedding augments text by replacing words with neighbors in the counter-fitted embedding space, with a constraint to ensure their cosine similarity is at least 0.8

  • charswap augments text by substituting, deleting, inserting, and swapping adjacent characters

  • eda augments text with a combination of word insertions, substitutions and deletions.

  • checklist augments text by contraction/extension and by substituting names, locations, numbers.

  • clare augments text by replacing, inserting, and merging with a pre-trained masked language model.

  • back_trans augments text by backtranslation method.

Augmentation Command-Line Interface

The easiest way to use our data augmentation tools is with textattack augment <args>.

textattack augment takes an input CSV file, the “text” column to augment, along with the number of words to change per augmentation and the number of augmentations per input example. It outputs a CSV in the same format with all the augmented examples in the proper columns.

For instance, when given the following as examples.csv:

"text",label
"the rock is destined to be the 21st century's new conan and that he's going to make a splash even greater than arnold schwarzenegger , jean- claud van damme or steven segal.", 1
"the gorgeously elaborate continuation of 'the lord of the rings' trilogy is so huge that a column of words cannot adequately describe co-writer/director peter jackson's expanded vision of j . r . r . tolkien's middle-earth .", 1
"take care of my cat offers a refreshingly different slice of asian cinema .", 1
"a technically well-made suspenser . . . but its abrupt drop in iq points as it races to the finish line proves simply too discouraging to let slide .", 0
"it's a mystery how the movie could be released in this condition .", 0

The command

textattack augment --input-csv examples.csv --output-csv output.csv  --input-column text --recipe embedding --pct-words-to-swap .1 --transformations-per-example 2 --exclude-original

will augment the text column by altering 10% of each example’s words, generating twice as many augmentations as original inputs, and exclude the original inputs from the output CSV. (All of this will be saved to augment.csv by default.)

Tip: Just as running attacks interactively, you can also pass --interactive to augment samples inputted by the user to quickly try out different augmentation recipes!

After augmentation, here are the contents of augment.csv:

text,label
"the rock is destined to be the 21st century's newest conan and that he's gonna to make a splashing even stronger than arnold schwarzenegger , jean- claud van damme or steven segal.",1
"the rock is destined to be the 21tk century's novel conan and that he's going to make a splat even greater than arnold schwarzenegger , jean- claud van damme or stevens segal.",1
the gorgeously elaborate continuation of 'the lord of the rings' trilogy is so huge that a column of expression significant adequately describe co-writer/director pedro jackson's expanded vision of j . rs . r . tolkien's middle-earth .,1
the gorgeously elaborate continuation of 'the lordy of the piercings' trilogy is so huge that a column of mots cannot adequately describe co-novelist/director peter jackson's expanded vision of j . r . r . tolkien's middle-earth .,1
take care of my cat offerings a pleasantly several slice of asia cinema .,1
taking care of my cat offers a pleasantly different slice of asiatic kino .,1
a technically good-made suspenser . . . but its abrupt drop in iq points as it races to the finish bloodline proves straightforward too disheartening to let slide .,0
a technically well-made suspenser . . . but its abrupt drop in iq dot as it races to the finish line demonstrates simply too disheartening to leave slide .,0
it's a enigma how the film wo be releases in this condition .,0
it's a enigma how the filmmaking wo be publicized in this condition .,0

The ‘embedding’ augmentation recipe uses counterfitted embedding nearest-neighbors to augment data.