A Review on Leveraging Language Agnostic Automated Text Data Augmentation with Explainable Semantic Integrity

Data Augmentation (DA) is an effective strategy to increase model generalisation. In Natural Language Processing (NLP), DA remains in its early stages, primarily due to the inherent sensitivity of textual data, which complicates the augmentation process. These complexities are further increased in multilingual contexts, as DA techniques effective in one language may not yield comparable results in others. As a result, manually identifying optimal DA techniques that preserve semantic integrity and are language agnostic remains a significant challenge. It emphasises the necessity for automating the text DA process with Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI), which offers a promising approach by calculating word importance scores to effectively guide the augmentation. In this paper, a comprehensive review of existing approaches in auto-text DA is presented, beginning with an exploration of the concept of auto-text DA, followed by a discussion on its cross-lingual applications, and concluding with the integration of XAI for semantic preservation. The paper highlights the critical need for further research to enhance the effectiveness and applicability of XAI in auto-text DA, enabling its use across diverse languages.