Decoupling and Refilling: A Simple Data Augmentation Method for Aspect Term Extraction

Aspect term extraction (ATE) is an important Natural Language Processing task, which aims to extract aspect terms from reviews. Recently, data augmentation has emerged as a reliable approach for relieving data sparsity in the NLP area. For ATE, self-labeling and semi-generation methods have been proposed to implement effective data augmentation. However, they either rely on external data or a pretrained generation model. In this paper, we propose a simple and self-contained augmentation method, which produces new instances for augmentation by context decoupling and infrequent term refilling, without using external data and generation models. We conduct experiments on four benchmark SemEval datasets. The test results show that our method yields substantial improvements, and performs comparably to the state-of-the-art method which uses external data.