Indonesian Journal of Electrical Engineering and Informatics (IJEEI)
Vol 14, No 2: June 2026

Boosting Few-Shot Text Classification in Large Language Models with Data Augmentation

Ahmed El Saeid Ali Soliman (Cairo University)
Reda Abd Elwahab El-Khoribi (Cairo University)
Basma El-Demerdash (Cairo University)
Ahmed Elgayar (Cairo University)



Article Info

Publish Date
30 Jun 2026

Abstract

Few-shot text classification is a challenging problem in natural language processing. Models have to generalize from a small number of labeled examples. This paper investigates the effectiveness of data augmentation methods (back-translation, paraphrasing, and noise injection) on overfitting prevention and generalization enhancement in few-shot scenario for small transformer models such as DistilBERT and DistilRoBERTa. We perform experiments on two standard benchmark datasets, DBPedia-14 and BBC News, in the 3-shot, 5-shot, and 7-shot settings. The result shows that the data augmentation substantially improves the performance of the classification. With back-translation, DistilBERT achieves 0.98 and 0.96 accuracy on DBPedia-14 and BBC News in 7-shot setting, compared to 0.88 and 0.86 accuracy without any augmentation. These results demonstrate that carefully selected augmentations can bridge the performance gap between few-shot and fully supervised learning, enabling competitive results on resource constrained hardware without the need for massive, labeled datasets.

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Journal Info

Abbrev

IJEEI

Publisher

Subject

Computer Science & IT Electrical & Electronics Engineering

Description

Indonesian Journal of Electrical Engineering and Informatics (IJEEI) is a peer reviewed International Journal in English published four issues per year (March, June, September and December). The aim of Indonesian Journal of Electrical Engineering and Informatics (IJEEI) is to publish high-quality ...