Syntax-driven Data Augmentation for Named Entity Recognition

Abstract: In low resource settings, data augmentation strategies are commonly leveraged to improve performance. Numerous approaches have attempted document-level augmentation (e.g., text classification), but few studies have explored token-level augmentation. Performed naively, data augmentation can produce semantically incongruent and ungrammatical examples. In this work, we compare simple masked LLM replacement and an augmentation method using constituency tree mutations to improve the performance of named entity recognition in low-resource settings with the aim of preserving linguistic cohesion of the augmented sentences.