Embodiments of the technology described herein describe a machine classifier capable of continually learning new classes through a continual few-shot learning approach. A natural language processing (NLP) machine classifier may initially be trained to identify a plurality of other classes through a conventional training process. In order to learn a new class, natural-language training data for a new class is generated. The training data for the new class may be few-shot training data. The training also uses synthetic training data that represents each of the plurality of other classes. The synthetic training data may be generated through a model inversion of the original classifier. The synthetic training data and the natural-language training data are used to retrain the NLP classifier to identify text in the plurality of other classes and the new class using.