We have recently seen the emergence of several publicly available Natural Language Understanding (NLU) toolkits, which map user utterances to structured, but more abstract, Dialogue Act (DA) or Intent specifications, while making this process accessible to the lay developer. In this paper, we present the first wide coverage evaluation and comparison of some of the most popular NLU services, on a large, multi-domain (21 domains) dataset of 25K user utterances that we have collected and annotated with Intent and Entity Type specifications and which will be released as part of this submission. The results show that on Intent classification Watson significantly outperforms the other platforms, namely, Dialogflow, LUIS and Rasa; though these also perform well. Interestingly, on Entity Type recognition, Watson performs significantly worse due to its low Precision. Again, Dialogflow, LUIS and Rasa perform well on this task.
Intent classification and slot filling are two essential tasks for natural language understanding. They often suffer from small-scale human-labeled training data, resulting in poor generalization capability, especially for rare words. Recently a new language representation model, BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers), facilitates pre-training deep bidirectional representations on large-scale unlabeled corpora, and has created state-of-the-art models for a wide variety of natural language processing tasks after simple fine-tuning. However, there has not been much effort on exploring BERT for natural language understanding. In this work, we propose a joint intent classification and slot filling model based on BERT. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed model achieves significant improvement on intent classification accuracy, slot filling F1, and sentence-level semantic frame accuracy on several public benchmark datasets, compared to the attention-based recurrent neural network models and slot-gated models.
Text classification tends to struggle when data is deficient or when it needs to adapt to unseen classes. In such challenging scenarios, recent studies have used meta-learning to simulate the few-shot task, in which new queries are compared to a small support set at the sample-wise level. However, this sample-wise comparison may be severely disturbed by the various expressions in the same class. Therefore, we should be able to learn a general representation of each class in the support set and then compare it to new queries. In this paper, we propose a novel Induction Network to learn such a generalized class-wise representation, by innovatively leveraging the dynamic routing algorithm in meta-learning. In this way, we find the model is able to induce and generalize better. We evaluate the proposed model on a well-studied sentiment classification dataset (English) and a real-world dialogue intent classification dataset (Chinese). Experiment results show that on both datasets, the proposed model significantly outperforms the existing state-of-the-art approaches, proving the effectiveness of class-wise generalization in few-shot text classification.
In this paper, we introduce a methodology for predicting intent and slots of a query for a chatbot that answers career-related queries. We take a multi-staged approach where both the processes (intent-classification and slot-tagging) inform each other's decision-making in different stages. The model breaks down the problem into stages, solving one problem at a time and passing on relevant results of the current stage to the next, thereby reducing search space for subsequent stages, and eventually making classification and tagging more viable after each stage. We also observe that relaxing rules for a fuzzy entity-matching in slot-tagging after each stage (by maintaining a separate Named Entity Tagger per stage) helps us improve performance, although at a slight cost of false-positives. Our model has achieved state-of-the-art performance with F1-score of 77.63% for intent-classification and 82.24% for slot-tagging on our dataset that we would publicly release along with the paper.
In the biomedical domain, the lack of sharable datasets often limit the possibility of developing natural language processing systems, especially dialogue applications and natural language understanding models. To overcome this issue, we explore data generation using templates and terminologies and data augmentation approaches. Namely, we report our experiments using paraphrasing and word representations learned on a large EHR corpus with Fasttext and ELMo, to learn a NLU model without any available dataset. We evaluate on a NLU task of natural language queries in EHRs divided in slot-filling and intent classification sub-tasks. On the slot-filling task, we obtain a F-score of 0.76 with the ELMo representation; and on the classification task, a mean F-score of 0.71. Our results show that this method could be used to develop a baseline system.
In this paper, we introduce the use of Semantic Hashing as embedding for the task of Intent Classification and achieve state-of-the-art performance on three frequently used benchmarks. Intent Classification on a small dataset is a challenging task for data-hungry state-of-the-art Deep Learning based systems. Semantic Hashing is an attempt to overcome such a challenge and learn robust text classification. Current word embedding based are dependent on vocabularies. One of the major drawbacks of such methods is out-of-vocabulary terms, especially when having small training datasets and using a wider vocabulary. This is the case in Intent Classification for chatbots, where typically small datasets are extracted from internet communication. Two problems arise by the use of internet communication. First, such datasets miss a lot of terms in the vocabulary to use word embeddings efficiently. Second, users frequently make spelling errors. Typically, the models for intent classification are not trained with spelling errors and it is difficult to think about ways in which users will make mistakes. Models depending on a word vocabulary will always face such issues. An ideal classifier should handle spelling errors inherently. With Semantic Hashing, we overcome these challenges and achieve state-of-the-art results on three datasets: AskUbuntu, Chatbot, and Web Application. Our benchmarks are available online: https://github.com/kumar-shridhar/Know-Your-Intent
In this paper we determine how multi-layer ensembling improves performance on multilingual intent classification. We develop a novel multi-layer ensembling approach that ensembles both different model initializations and different model architectures. We also introduce a new banking domain dataset and compare results against the standard ATIS dataset and the Chinese SMP2017 dataset to determine ensembling performance in multilingual and multi-domain contexts. We run ensemble experiments across all three datasets, and conclude that ensembling provides significant performance increases, and that multi-layer ensembling is a no-risk way to improve performance on intent classification. We also find that a diverse ensemble of simple models can reach perform comparable to much more sophisticated state-of-the-art models. Our best F 1 scores on ATIS, Banking, and SMP are 97.54%, 91.79%, and 93.55% respectively, which compare well with the state-of-the-art on ATIS and best submission to the SMP2017 competition. The total ensembling performance increases we achieve are 0.23%, 1.96%, and 4.04% F 1 respectively.
Attention-based encoder-decoder neural network models have recently shown promising results in machine translation and speech recognition. In this work, we propose an attention-based neural network model for joint intent detection and slot filling, both of which are critical steps for many speech understanding and dialog systems. Unlike in machine translation and speech recognition, alignment is explicit in slot filling. We explore different strategies in incorporating this alignment information to the encoder-decoder framework. Learning from the attention mechanism in encoder-decoder model, we further propose introducing attention to the alignment-based RNN models. Such attentions provide additional information to the intent classification and slot label prediction. Our independent task models achieve state-of-the-art intent detection error rate and slot filling F1 score on the benchmark ATIS task. Our joint training model further obtains 0.56% absolute (23.8% relative) error reduction on intent detection and 0.23% absolute gain on slot filling over the independent task models.
Label propagation is a powerful and flexible semi-supervised learning technique on graphs. Neural networks, on the other hand, have proven track records in many supervised learning tasks. In this work, we propose a training framework with a graph-regularised objective, namely "Neural Graph Machines", that can combine the power of neural networks and label propagation. This work generalises previous literature on graph-augmented training of neural networks, enabling it to be applied to multiple neural architectures (Feed-forward NNs, CNNs and LSTM RNNs) and a wide range of graphs. The new objective allows the neural networks to harness both labeled and unlabeled data by: (a) allowing the network to train using labeled data as in the supervised setting, (b) biasing the network to learn similar hidden representations for neighboring nodes on a graph, in the same vein as label propagation. Such architectures with the proposed objective can be trained efficiently using stochastic gradient descent and scaled to large graphs, with a runtime that is linear in the number of edges. The proposed joint training approach convincingly outperforms many existing methods on a wide range of tasks (multi-label classification on social graphs, news categorization, document classification and semantic intent classification), with multiple forms of graph inputs (including graphs with and without node-level features) and using different types of neural networks.
In this report, we provide a comparative analysis of different techniques for user intent classification towards the task of app recommendation. We analyse the performance of different models and architectures for multi-label classification over a dataset with a relative large number of classes and only a handful examples of each class. We focus, in particular, on memory network architectures, and compare how well the different versions perform under the task constraints. Since the classifier is meant to serve as a module in a practical dialog system, it needs to be able to work with limited training data and incorporate new data on the fly. We devise a 1-shot learning task to test the models under the above constraint. We conclude that relatively simple versions of memory networks perform better than other approaches. Although, for tasks with very limited data, simple non-parametric methods perform comparably, without needing the extra training data.
In this paper, we introduce the first evaluation of Chinese human-computer dialogue technology. We detail the evaluation scheme, tasks, metrics and how to collect and annotate the data for training, developing and test. The evaluation includes two tasks, namely user intent classification and online testing of task-oriented dialogue. To consider the different sources of the data for training and developing, the first task can also be divided into two sub tasks. Both the two tasks are coming from the real problems when using the applications developed by industry. The evaluation data is provided by the iFLYTEK Corporation. Meanwhile, in this paper, we publish the evaluation results to present the current performance of the participants in the two tasks of Chinese human-computer dialogue technology. Moreover, we analyze the existing problems of human-computer dialogue as well as the evaluation scheme itself.
Sentence-level classification and sequential labeling are two fundamental tasks in language understanding. While these two tasks are usually modeled separately, in reality, they are often correlated, for example in intent classification and slot filling, or in topic classification and named-entity recognition. In order to utilize the potential benefits from their correlations, we propose a jointly trained model for learning the two tasks simultaneously via Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks. This model predicts the sentence-level category and the word-level label sequence from the stepwise output hidden representations of LSTM. We also introduce a novel mechanism of "sparse attention" to weigh words differently based on their semantic relevance to sentence-level classification. The proposed method outperforms baseline models on ATIS and TREC datasets.
This paper presents a generic Bayesian framework that enables any deep learning model to actively learn from targeted crowds. Our framework inherits from recent advances in Bayesian deep learning, and extends existing work by considering the targeted crowdsourcing approach, where multiple annotators with unknown expertise contribute an uncontrolled amount (often limited) of annotations. Our framework leverages the low-rank structure in annotations to learn individual annotator expertise, which then helps to infer the true labels from noisy and sparse annotations. It provides a unified Bayesian model to simultaneously infer the true labels and train the deep learning model in order to reach an optimal learning efficacy. Finally, our framework exploits the uncertainty of the deep learning model during prediction as well as the annotators' estimated expertise to minimize the number of required annotations and annotators for optimally training the deep learning model. We evaluate the effectiveness of our framework for intent classification in Alexa (Amazon's personal assistant), using both synthetic and real-world datasets. Experiments show that our framework can accurately learn annotator expertise, infer true labels, and effectively reduce the amount of annotations in model training as compared to state-of-the-art approaches. We further discuss the potential of our proposed framework in bridging machine learning and crowdsourcing towards improved human-in-the-loop systems.
We investigate task clustering for deep-learning based multi-task and few-shot learning in a many-task setting. We propose a new method to measure task similarities with cross-task transfer performance matrix for the deep learning scenario. Although this matrix provides us critical information regarding similarity between tasks, its asymmetric property and unreliable performance scores can affect conventional clustering methods adversely. Additionally, the uncertain task-pairs, i.e., the ones with extremely asymmetric transfer scores, may collectively mislead clustering algorithms to output an inaccurate task-partition. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel task-clustering algorithm by using the matrix completion technique. The proposed algorithm constructs a partially-observed similarity matrix based on the certainty of cluster membership of the task-pairs. We then use a matrix completion algorithm to complete the similarity matrix. Our theoretical analysis shows that under mild constraints, the proposed algorithm will perfectly recover the underlying "true" similarity matrix with a high probability. Our results show that the new task clustering method can discover task clusters for training flexible and superior neural network models in a multi-task learning setup for sentiment classification and dialog intent classification tasks. Our task clustering approach also extends metric-based few-shot learning methods to adapt multiple metrics, which demonstrates empirical advantages when the tasks are diverse.
We study few-shot learning in natural language domains. Compared to many existing works that apply either metric-based or optimization-based meta-learning to image domain with low inter-task variance, we consider a more realistic setting, where tasks are diverse. However, it imposes tremendous difficulties to existing state-of-the-art metric-based algorithms since a single metric is insufficient to capture complex task variations in natural language domain. To alleviate the problem, we propose an adaptive metric learning approach that automatically determines the best weighted combination from a set of metrics obtained from meta-training tasks for a newly seen few-shot task. Extensive quantitative evaluations on real-world sentiment analysis and dialog intent classification datasets demonstrate that the proposed method performs favorably against state-of-the-art few shot learning algorithms in terms of predictive accuracy. We make our code and data available for further study.
Intent classification has been widely researched on English data with deep learning approaches that are based on neural networks and word embeddings. The challenge for Chinese intent classification stems from the fact that, unlike English where most words are made up of 26 phonologic alphabet letters, Chinese is logographic, where a Chinese character is a more basic semantic unit that can be informative and its meaning does not vary too much in contexts. Chinese word embeddings alone can be inadequate for representing words, and pre-trained embeddings can suffer from not aligning well with the task at hand. To account for the inadequacy and leverage Chinese character information, we propose a low-effort and generic way to dynamically integrate character embedding based feature maps with word embedding based inputs, whose resulting word-character embeddings are stacked with a contextual information extraction module to further incorporate context information for predictions. On top of the proposed model, we employ an ensemble method to combine single models and obtain the final result. The approach is data-independent without relying on external sources like pre-trained word embeddings. The proposed model outperforms baseline models and existing methods.