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Understanding Compositional Data Augmentation in Typologically Diverse Morphological Inflection

Data augmentation techniques are widely used in low-resource automatic morphological inflection to overcome data sparsity. However, the full implications of these techniques remain poorly understood. In this study, we aim to shed light on the theoretical aspects of the prominent data augmentation strategy StemCorrupt (Silfverberg et al., 2017; Anastasopoulos and Neubig, 2019), a method that generates synthetic examples by randomly substituting stem characters in gold standard training examples. To begin, we conduct an information-theoretic analysis, arguing that StemCorrupt improves compositional generalization by eliminating spurious correlations between morphemes, specifically between the stem and the affixes. Our theoretical analysis further leads us to study the sample efficiency with which StemCorrupt reduces these spurious correlations. Through evaluation across seven typologically distinct languages, we demonstrate that selecting a subset of datapoints with both high diversity and high predictive uncertainty significantly enhances the data-efficiency of StemCorrupt. However, we also explore the impact of typological features on the choice of the data selection strategy and find that languages incorporating a high degree of allomorphy and phonological alternations derive less benefit from synthetic examples with high uncertainty. We attribute this effect to phonotactic violations induced by StemCorrupt, emphasizing the need for further research to ensure optimal performance across the entire spectrum of natural language morphology.

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