Text data augmentation is an effective strategy for overcoming the challenge of limited sample sizes in many natural language processing (NLP) tasks. This challenge is especially prominent in the few-shot learning (FSL) scenario, where the data in the target domain is generally much scarcer and of lowered quality. A natural and widely used strategy to mitigate such challenges is to perform data augmentation to better capture data invariance and increase the sample size. However, current text data augmentation methods either can’t ensure the correct labeling of the generated data (lacking faithfulness), or can’t ensure sufficient diversity in the generated data (lacking compactness), or both. Inspired by the recent success of large language models (LLM), especially the development of ChatGPT, we propose a text data augmentation approach based on ChatGPT (named ”AugGPT”). AugGPT rephrases each sentence in the training samples into multiple conceptually similar but semantically different samples. The augmented samples can then be used in downstream model training. Experiment results on multiple few-shot learning text classification tasks show the superior performance of the proposed AugGPT approach over state-of-the-art text data augmentation methods in terms of testing accuracy and distribution of the augmented samples.

Multimodality medical imaging techniques have been increasingly applied in clinical practice and research studies. Corresponding multimodal image analysis and ensemble learning schemes have seen rapid growth and bring unique value to medical applications. Motivated by the recent success of applying deep learning methods to medical image processing, we first propose an algorithmic architecture for supervised multimodal image analysis with cross-modality fusion at the feature learning level, classifier level, and decision-making level. We then design and implement an image segmentation system based on deep convolutional neural networks to contour the lesions of soft tissue sarcomas using multimodal images, including those from magnetic resonance imaging, computed tomography, and positron emission tomography. The network trained with multimodal images shows superior performance compared to networks trained with single-modal images. For the task of tumor segmentation, performing image fusion within the network (i.e., fusing at convolutional or fully connected layers) is generally better than fusing images at the network output (i.e., voting). This paper provides empirical guidance for the design and application of multimodal image analysis.