Weakly supervised data augmentation through prompting for dialogue understanding

Dialogue understanding tasks often necessitate abundant annotated data to achieve good performance and that presents challenges in low-resource settings. To alleviate this barrier, we explore few-shot data augmentation for dialogue understanding by prompting large pre-trained language models and present a novel approach that iterates on augmentation quality by applying weakly-supervised filters. We evaluate our methods on the emotion and act classification tasks in DAILYDIALOG and the intent classification task in FACEBOOK MULTILINGUAL TASK-ORIENTED DIALOGUE. Models fine-tuned on our augmented data mixed with few-shot ground truth data are able to approach or surpass existing state-of-the-art performance on both datasets. For DAILYDIALOG specifically, using 10% of the ground truth data we outperform the current state-of-the-art model which uses 100% of the data.