Deep learning has been the mainstream technique in natural language processing (NLP) area. However, the techniques require many labeled data and are less generalizable across domains. Meta-learning is an arising field in machine learning studying approaches to learn better learning algorithms. Approaches aim at improving algorithms in various aspects, including data efficiency and generalizability. Efficacy of approaches has been shown in many NLP tasks, but there is no systematic survey of these approaches in NLP, which hinders more researchers from joining the field. Our goal with this survey paper is to offer researchers pointers to relevant meta-learning works in NLP and attract more attention from the NLP community to drive future innovation. This paper first introduces the general concepts of meta-learning and the common approaches. Then we summarize task construction settings and application of meta-learning for various NLP problems and review the development of meta-learning in NLP community.

这篇综述论文介绍了自然语言处理领域中元学习的概念和应用，指出当前技术需要更多的标注数据和适用域限制，而元学习技术则旨在提高学习算法的数据效率和适用范围，在NLP任务中表现出了显著的效果。此外，该论文总结了元学习在NLP中的任务构建、问题应用和发展趋势，为研究人员提供了相关工作的指导和吸引更多研究关注。

自然语言处理的元学习综述