  We introduce a few-shot learning framework for error detection. We show that
data augmentation (a form of weak supervision) is key to training high-quality,
ML-based error detection models that require minimal human involvement. Our
framework consists of two parts: (1) an expressive model to learn rich
representations that capture the inherent syntactic and semantic heterogeneity
of errors; and (2) a data augmentation model that, given a small seed of clean
records, uses dataset-specific transformations to automatically generate
additional training data. Our key insight is to learn data augmentation
policies from the noisy input dataset in a weakly supervised manner. We show
that our framework detects errors with an average precision of ~94% and an
average recall of ~93% across a diverse array of datasets that exhibit
different types and amounts of errors. We compare our approach to a
comprehensive collection of error detection methods, ranging from traditional
rule-based methods to ensemble-based and active learning approaches. We show
that data augmentation yields an average improvement of 20 F1 points while it
requires access to 3x fewer labeled examples compared to other ML approaches.
