No Arabic abstract
Few-shot Intent Detection is challenging due to the scarcity of available annotated utterances. Although recent works demonstrate that multi-level matching plays an important role in transferring learned knowledge from seen training classes to novel testing classes, they rely on a static similarity measure and overly fine-grained matching components. These limitations inhibit generalizing capability towards Generalized Few-shot Learning settings where both seen and novel classes are co-existent. In this paper, we propose a novel Semantic Matching and Aggregation Network where semantic components are distilled from utterances via multi-head self-attention with additional dynamic regularization constraints. These semantic components capture high-level information, resulting in more effective matching between instances. Our multi-perspective matching method provides a comprehensive matching measure to enhance representations of both labeled and unlabeled instances. We also propose a more challenging evaluation setting that considers classification on the joint all-class label space. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. Our code and data are publicly available.
Few-shot intent detection is a challenging task due to the scare annotation problem. In this paper, we propose a Pseudo Siamese Network (PSN) to generate labeled data for few-shot intents and alleviate this problem. PSN consists of two identical subnetworks with the same structure but different weights: an action network and an object network. Each subnetwork is a transformer-based variational autoencoder that tries to model the latent distribution of different components in the sentence. The action network is learned to understand action tokens and the object network focuses on object-related expressions. It provides an interpretable framework for generating an utterance with an action and an object existing in a given intent. Experiments on two real-world datasets show that PSN achieves state-of-the-art performance for the generalized few shot intent detection task.
In this work, we focus on a more challenging few-shot intent detection scenario where many intents are fine-grained and semantically similar. We present a simple yet effective few-shot intent detection schema via contrastive pre-training and fine-tuning. Specifically, we first conduct self-supervised contrastive pre-training on collected intent datasets, which implicitly learns to discriminate semantically similar utterances without using any labels. We then perform few-shot intent detection together with supervised contrastive learning, which explicitly pulls utterances from the same intent closer and pushes utterances across different intents farther. Experimental results show that our proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance on three challenging intent detection datasets under 5-shot and 10-shot settings.
In this paper, we study the few-shot multi-label classification for user intent detection. For multi-label intent detection, state-of-the-art work estimates label-instance relevance scores and uses a threshold to select multiple associated intent labels. To determine appropriate thresholds with only a few examples, we first learn universal thresholding experience on data-rich domains, and then adapt the thresholds to certain few-shot domains with a calibration based on nonparametric learning. For better calculation of label-instance relevance score, we introduce label name embedding as anchor points in representation space, which refines representations of different classes to be well-separated from each other. Experiments on two datasets show that the proposed model significantly outperforms strong baselines in both one-shot and five-shot settings.
In this paper, we formulate a more realistic and difficult problem setup for the intent detection task in natural language understanding, namely Generalized Few-Shot Intent Detection (GFSID). GFSID aims to discriminate a joint label space consisting of both existing intents which have enough labeled data and novel intents which only have a few examples for each class. To approach this problem, we propose a novel model, Conditional Text Generation with BERT (CG-BERT). CG-BERT effectively leverages a large pre-trained language model to generate text conditioned on the intent label. By modeling the utterance distribution with variational inference, CG-BERT can generate diverse utterances for the novel intents even with only a few utterances available. Experimental results show that CG-BERT achieves state-of-the-art performance on the GFSID task with 1-shot and 5-shot settings on two real-world datasets.
Zero-shot intent detection (ZSID) aims to deal with the continuously emerging intents without annotated training data. However, existing ZSID systems suffer from two limitations: 1) They are not good at modeling the relationship between seen and unseen intents. 2) They cannot effectively recognize unseen intents under the generalized intent detection (GZSID) setting. A critical problem behind these limitations is that the representations of unseen intents cannot be learned in the training stage. To address this problem, we propose a novel framework that utilizes unseen class labels to learn Class-Transductive Intent Representations (CTIR). Specifically, we allow the model to predict unseen intents during training, with the corresponding label names serving as input utterances. On this basis, we introduce a multi-task learning objective, which encourages the model to learn the distinctions among intents, and a similarity scorer, which estimates the connections among intents more accurately. CTIR is easy to implement and can be integrated with existing methods. Experiments on two real-world datasets show that CTIR brings considerable improvement to the baseline systems.