Natural language understanding is an important task in modern dialogue systems. It becomes more important with the rapid extension of the dialogue systems' functionality. In this work, we present an approach to zero-shot transfer learning for the tas
ks of intent classification and slot-filling based on pre-trained language models. We use deep contextualized models feeding them with utterances and natural language descriptions of user intents to get text embeddings. These embeddings then used by a small neural network to produce predictions for intent and slot probabilities. This architecture achieves new state-of-the-art results in two zero-shot scenarios. One is a single language new skill adaptation and another one is a cross-lingual adaptation.
The style transfer task (here style is used in a broad authorial'' sense with many aspects including register, sentence structure, and vocabulary choice) takes text input and rewrites it in a specified target style preserving the meaning, but alterin
g the style of the source text to match that of the target. Much of the existing research on this task depends on the use of parallel datasets. In this work we employ recent results in unsupervised cross-lingual language modeling (XLM) and machine translation to effect style transfer while treating the input data as unaligned. First, we show that adding content embeddings'' to the XLM which capture human-specified groupings of subject matter can improve performance over the baseline model. Evaluation of style transfer has often relied on metrics designed for machine translation which have received criticism of their suitability for this task. As a second contribution, we propose the use of a suite of classical stylometrics as a useful complement for evaluation. We select a few such measures and include these in the analysis of our results.
