Detecting out-of-scope user utterances is essential for task-oriented dialogues and intent classification. Current methodologies face difficulties with the unpredictable distribution of outliers and often rely on assumptions about data distributions. We present the Dual Encoder for Threshold-Based Re-Classification (DETER) to address these challenges. This end-to-end framework efficiently detects out-of-scope intents without requiring assumptions on data distributions or additional post-processing steps. The core of DETER utilizes dual text encoders, the Universal Sentence Encoder (USE) and the Transformer-based Denoising AutoEncoder (TSDAE), to generate user utterance embeddings, which are classified through a branched neural architecture. Further, DETER generates synthetic outliers using self-supervision and incorporates out-of-scope phrases from open-domain datasets. This approach ensures a comprehensive training set for out-of-scope detection. Additionally, a threshold-based re-classification mechanism refines the model's initial predictions. Evaluations on the CLINC-150, Stackoverflow, and Banking77 datasets demonstrate DETER's efficacy. Our model outperforms previous benchmarks, increasing up to 13% and 5% in F1 score for known and unknown intents on CLINC-150 and Stackoverflow, and 16% for known and 24% % for unknown intents on Banking77. The source code has been released at https://github.com/Hossam-Mohammed-tech/Intent_Classification_OOS.
Navigating the complexities of language diversity is a central challenge in developing robust natural language processing systems, especially in specialized domains like banking. The Moroccan Dialect (Darija) serves as the common language that blends cultural complexities, historical impacts, and regional differences. The complexities of Darija present a special set of challenges for language models, as it differs from Modern Standard Arabic with strong influence from French, Spanish, and Tamazight, it requires a specific approach for effective communication. To tackle these challenges, this paper introduces \textbf{DarijaBanking}, a novel Darija dataset aimed at enhancing intent classification in the banking domain, addressing the critical need for automatic banking systems (e.g., chatbots) that communicate in the native language of Moroccan clients. DarijaBanking comprises over 1,800 parallel high-quality queries in Darija, Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), English, and French, organized into 24 intent classes. We experimented with various intent classification methods, including full fine-tuning of monolingual and multilingual models, zero-shot learning, retrieval-based approaches, and Large Language Model prompting. One of the main contributions of this work is BERTouch, our BERT-based language model for intent classification in Darija. BERTouch achieved F1-scores of 0.98 for Darija and 0.96 for MSA on DarijaBanking, outperforming the state-of-the-art alternatives including GPT-4 showcasing its effectiveness in the targeted application.
Recently, deep end-to-end learning has been studied for intent classification in Spoken Language Understanding (SLU). However, end-to-end models require a large amount of speech data with intent labels, and highly optimized models are generally sensitive to the inconsistency between the training and evaluation conditions. Therefore, a natural language understanding approach based on Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) remains attractive because it can utilize a pre-trained general language model and adapt to the mismatch of the speech input environment. Using this module-based approach, we improve a noisy-channel model to handle transcription inconsistencies caused by ASR errors. We propose a two-stage method, Contrastive and Consistency Learning (CCL), that correlates error patterns between clean and noisy ASR transcripts and emphasizes the consistency of the latent features of the two transcripts. Experiments on four benchmark datasets show that CCL outperforms existing methods and improves the ASR robustness in various noisy environments. Code is available at https://github.com/syoung7388/CCL.
The progression to "Pervasive Augmented Reality" envisions easy access to multimodal information continuously. However, in many everyday scenarios, users are occupied physically, cognitively or socially. This may increase the friction to act upon the multimodal information that users encounter in the world. To reduce such friction, future interactive interfaces should intelligently provide quick access to digital actions based on users' context. To explore the range of possible digital actions, we conducted a diary study that required participants to capture and share the media that they intended to perform actions on (e.g., images or audio), along with their desired actions and other contextual information. Using this data, we generated a holistic design space of digital follow-up actions that could be performed in response to different types of multimodal sensory inputs. We then designed OmniActions, a pipeline powered by large language models (LLMs) that processes multimodal sensory inputs and predicts follow-up actions on the target information grounded in the derived design space. Using the empirical data collected in the diary study, we performed quantitative evaluations on three variations of LLM techniques (intent classification, in-context learning and finetuning) and identified the most effective technique for our task. Additionally, as an instantiation of the pipeline, we developed an interactive prototype and reported preliminary user feedback about how people perceive and react to the action predictions and its errors.
This paper explores SynTOD, a new synthetic data generation approach for developing end-to-end Task-Oriented Dialogue (TOD) Systems capable of handling complex tasks such as intent classification, slot filling, conversational question-answering, and retrieval-augmented response generation, without relying on crowdsourcing or real-world data. SynTOD utilizes a state transition graph to define the desired behavior of a TOD system and generates diverse, structured conversations through random walks and response simulation using large language models (LLMs). In our experiments, using graph-guided response simulations leads to significant improvements in intent classification, slot filling and response relevance compared to naive single-prompt simulated conversations. We also investigate the end-to-end TOD effectiveness of different base and instruction-tuned LLMs, with and without the constructed synthetic conversations. Finally, we explore how various LLMs can evaluate responses in a TOD system and how well they are correlated with human judgments. Our findings pave the path towards quick development and evaluation of domain-specific TOD systems. We release our datasets, models, and code for research purposes.
Intent classification and slot-filling are essential tasks of Spoken Language Understanding (SLU). In most SLUsystems, those tasks are realized by independent modules. For about fifteen years, models achieving both of themjointly and exploiting their mutual enhancement have been proposed. A multilingual module using a joint modelwas envisioned to create a touristic dialogue system for a European project, HumanE-AI-Net. A combination ofmultiple datasets, including the MEDIA dataset, was suggested for training this joint model. The MEDIA SLU datasetis a French dataset distributed since 2005 by ELRA, mainly used by the French research community and free foracademic research since 2020. Unfortunately, it is annotated only in slots but not intents. An enhanced version ofMEDIA annotated with intents has been built to extend its use to more tasks and use cases. This paper presents thesemi-automatic methodology used to obtain this enhanced version. In addition, we present the first results of SLUexperiments on this enhanced dataset using joint models for intent classification and slot-filling.
We present Conformal Intent Classification and Clarification (CICC), a framework for fast and accurate intent classification for task-oriented dialogue systems. The framework turns heuristic uncertainty scores of any intent classifier into a clarification question that is guaranteed to contain the true intent at a pre-defined confidence level. By disambiguating between a small number of likely intents, the user query can be resolved quickly and accurately. Additionally, we propose to augment the framework for out-of-scope detection. In a comparative evaluation using seven intent recognition datasets we find that CICC generates small clarification questions and is capable of out-of-scope detection. CICC can help practitioners and researchers substantially in improving the user experience of dialogue agents with specific clarification questions.
State-of-the-art intent classification (IC) and slot filling (SF) methods often rely on data-intensive deep learning models, limiting their practicality for industry applications. Large language models on the other hand, particularly instruction-tuned models (Instruct-LLMs), exhibit remarkable zero-shot performance across various natural language tasks. This study evaluates Instruct-LLMs on popular benchmark datasets for IC and SF, emphasizing their capacity to learn from fewer examples. We introduce ILLUMINER, an approach framing IC and SF as language generation tasks for Instruct-LLMs, with a more efficient SF-prompting method compared to prior work. A comprehensive comparison with multiple baselines shows that our approach, using the FLAN-T5 11B model, outperforms the state-of-the-art joint IC+SF method and in-context learning with GPT3.5 (175B), particularly in slot filling by 11.1--32.2 percentage points. Additionally, our in-depth ablation study demonstrates that parameter-efficient fine-tuning requires less than 6% of training data to yield comparable performance with traditional full-weight fine-tuning.
Multi-turn intent classification is notably challenging due to the complexity and evolving nature of conversational contexts. This paper introduces LARA, a Linguistic-Adaptive Retrieval-Augmentation framework to enhance accuracy in multi-turn classification tasks across six languages, accommodating a large number of intents in chatbot interactions. LARA combines a fine-tuned smaller model with a retrieval-augmented mechanism, integrated within the architecture of LLMs. The integration allows LARA to dynamically utilize past dialogues and relevant intents, thereby improving the understanding of the context. Furthermore, our adaptive retrieval techniques bolster the cross-lingual capabilities of LLMs without extensive retraining and fine-tuning. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that LARA achieves state-of-the-art performance on multi-turn intent classification tasks, enhancing the average accuracy by 3.67\% from state-of-the-art single-turn intent classifiers.
Intent classifiers must be able to distinguish when a user's utterance does not belong to any supported intent to avoid producing incorrect and unrelated system responses. Although out-of-scope (OOS) detection for intent classifiers has been studied, previous work has not yet studied changes in classifier performance against hard-negative out-of-scope utterances (i.e., inputs that share common features with in-scope data, but are actually out-of-scope). We present an automated technique to generate hard-negative OOS data using ChatGPT. We use our technique to build five new hard-negative OOS datasets, and evaluate each against three benchmark intent classifiers. We show that classifiers struggle to correctly identify hard-negative OOS utterances more than general OOS utterances. Finally, we show that incorporating hard-negative OOS data for training improves model robustness when detecting hard-negative OOS data and general OOS data. Our technique, datasets, and evaluation address an important void in the field, offering a straightforward and inexpensive way to collect hard-negative OOS data and improve intent classifiers' robustness.
Conversational systems often rely on embedding models for intent classification and intent clustering tasks. The advent of Large Language Models (LLMs), which enable instructional embeddings allowing one to adjust semantics over the embedding space using prompts, are being viewed as a panacea for these downstream conversational tasks. However, traditional evaluation benchmarks rely solely on task metrics that don't particularly measure gaps related to semantic understanding. Thus, we propose an intent semantic toolkit that gives a more holistic view of intent embedding models by considering three tasks-- (1) intent classification, (2) intent clustering, and (3) a novel triplet task. The triplet task gauges the model's understanding of two semantic concepts paramount in real-world conversational systems-- negation and implicature. We observe that current embedding models fare poorly in semantic understanding of these concepts. To address this, we propose a pre-training approach to improve the embedding model by leveraging augmentation with data generated by an auto-regressive model and a contrastive loss term. Our approach improves the semantic understanding of the intent embedding model on the aforementioned linguistic dimensions while slightly effecting their performance on downstream task metrics.
Electric automation systems offer convenience and efficiency in controlling electrical circuits and devices. Traditionally, these systems rely on predefined commands for control, limiting flexibility and adaptability. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to augment automation by introducing intent-based user instruction classification using machine learning techniques. Our system represents user instructions as intents, allowing for dynamic control of electrical circuits without relying on predefined commands. Through a machine learning model trained on a labeled dataset of user instructions, our system classifies intents from user input, enabling a more intuitive and adaptable control scheme. We present the design and implementation of our intent-based electric automation system, detailing the development of the machine learning model for intent classification. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in enhancing user experience and expanding the capabilities of electric automation systems. Our work contributes to the advancement of smart technologies by providing a more seamless interaction between users and their environments.
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance on a number of natural language processing tasks, such as question answering and text summarization. However, their performance on sequence labeling tasks such as intent classification and slot filling (IC-SF), which is a central component in personal assistant systems, lags significantly behind discriminative models. Furthermore, there is a lack of substantive research on the robustness of LLMs to various perturbations in the input prompts. The contributions of this paper are three-fold. First, we show that fine-tuning sufficiently large LLMs can produce IC-SF performance comparable to discriminative models. Next, we systematically analyze the performance deterioration of those fine-tuned models due to three distinct yet relevant types of input perturbations - oronyms, synonyms, and paraphrasing. Finally, we propose an efficient mitigation approach, Prompt Perturbation Consistency Learning (PPCL), which works by regularizing the divergence between losses from clean and perturbed samples. Our experiments demonstrate that PPCL can recover on average 59% and 69% of the performance drop for IC and SF tasks, respectively. Furthermore, PPCL beats the data augmentation approach while using ten times fewer augmented data samples.
Pretrained language models (PLMs) have become remarkably adept at task and language generalization. Nonetheless, they often fail when faced with unseen languages. In this work, we present LinguAlchemy, a regularization method that incorporates various linguistic information covering typological, geographical, and phylogenetic features to align PLMs representation to the corresponding linguistic information on each language. Our LinguAlchemy significantly improves the performance of mBERT and XLM-R on low-resource languages in multiple downstream tasks such as intent classification, news classification, and semantic relatedness compared to fully finetuned models and displaying a high degree of unseen language generalization. We further introduce AlchemyScale and AlchemyTune, extension of LinguAlchemy which adjusts the linguistic regularization weights automatically, alleviating the need for hyperparameter search.
In the realm of spoken language understanding (SLU), numerous natural language understanding (NLU) methodologies have been adapted by supplying large language models (LLMs) with transcribed speech instead of conventional written text. In real-world scenarios, prior to input into an LLM, an automated speech recognition (ASR) system generates an output transcript hypothesis, where inherent errors can degrade subsequent SLU tasks. Here we introduce a method that utilizes the ASR system's lattice output instead of relying solely on the top hypothesis, aiming to encapsulate speech ambiguities and enhance SLU outcomes. Our in-context learning experiments, covering spoken question answering and intent classification, underline the LLM's resilience to noisy speech transcripts with the help of word confusion networks from lattices, bridging the SLU performance gap between using the top ASR hypothesis and an oracle upper bound. Additionally, we delve into the LLM's robustness to varying ASR performance conditions and scrutinize the aspects of in-context learning which prove the most influential.
Nowadays, dialogue systems are used in many fields of industry and research. There are successful instances of these systems, such as Apple Siri, Google Assistant, and IBM Watson. Task-oriented dialogue system is a category of these, that are used in specific tasks. They can perform tasks such as booking plane tickets or making restaurant reservations. Shopping is one of the most popular areas on these systems. The bot replaces the human salesperson and interacts with the customers by speaking. To train the models behind the scenes of these systems, annotated data is needed. In this paper, we developed a dataset of dialogues in the Persian language through crowd-sourcing. We annotated these dialogues to train a model. This dataset contains nearly 22k utterances in 15 different domains and 1061 dialogues. This is the largest Persian dataset in this field, which is provided freely so that future researchers can use it. Also, we proposed some baseline models for natural language understanding (NLU) tasks. These models perform two tasks for NLU: intent classification and entity extraction. The F-1 score metric obtained for intent classification is around 91% and for entity extraction is around 93%, which can be a baseline for future research.
Pre-trained conversation models (PCMs) have demonstrated remarkable results in task-oriented dialogue (TOD) systems. Many PCMs focus predominantly on dialogue management tasks like dialogue state tracking, dialogue generation tasks like response generation, or both. However, the existing PCMs seldom consider dialogue comprehension tasks, such as dialogue question answering and summarization tasks. These tasks allow PCMs to glean dialogue context from various angles. This observation naturally raises the question: Can the performance of downstream dialogue tasks be enhanced if a PCM is pre-trained on dialogue management, generation, and comprehension tasks? To investigate this, we proposed an Omnipotent Dialogue pre-training model (OmniDialog). It unifies these three dialogue tasks into a monolithic framework by multi-task learning, fostering inter-task communication. The pre-training corpus of OmniDialog spans $\mathbf{7}$ dialogue-focused tasks, drawing from $\mathbf{15}$ datasets and encompassing over $\mathbf{3.2}$ million dialogue utterances. To our knowledge, OmniDialog is a pioneering PCM pre-trained across dialogue management, generation, and comprehension domains. We evaluated its performance across four tasks: dialogue summarization, end-to-end dialogue modeling, dialogue state tracking, and intent classification. The results underscore its efficacy in domain transfer learning, low-resource, and full-dataset scenarios. Furthermore, to glean a nuanced understanding of OmniDialog's strengths and potential pitfalls, we designed a fine-grained analysis framework for dialogue-centric tasks. Experimental results show that the OmniDialog is good at hard samples, such as long dialogues and lengthy responses.
Few-shot intent classification and slot filling are important but challenging tasks due to the scarcity of finely labeled data. Therefore, current works first train a model on source domains with sufficiently labeled data, and then transfer the model to target domains where only rarely labeled data is available. However, experience transferring as a whole usually suffers from gaps that exist among source domains and target domains. For instance, transferring domain-specific-knowledge-related experience is difficult. To tackle this problem, we propose a new method that explicitly decouples the transferring of general-semantic-representation-related experience and the domain-specific-knowledge-related experience. Specifically, for domain-specific-knowledge-related experience, we design two modules to capture intent-slot relation and slot-slot relation respectively. Extensive experiments on Snips and FewJoint datasets show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance. The method improves the joint accuracy metric from 27.72% to 42.20% in the 1-shot setting, and from 46.54% to 60.79% in the 5-shot setting.
Intent classification is a fundamental task in natural language understanding, aiming to categorize user queries or sentences into predefined classes to understand user intent. The most challenging aspect of this particular task lies in effectively incorporating all possible classes of intent into a dataset while ensuring adequate linguistic variation. Plenty of research has been conducted in the related domains in rich-resource languages like English. In this study, we introduce BNIntent30, a comprehensive Bengali intent classification dataset containing 30 intent classes. The dataset is excerpted and translated from the CLINIC150 dataset containing a diverse range of user intents categorized over 150 classes. Furthermore, we propose a novel approach for Bengali intent classification using Generative Adversarial BERT to evaluate the proposed dataset, which we call GAN-BnBERT. Our approach leverages the power of BERT-based contextual embeddings to capture salient linguistic features and contextual information from the text data, while the generative adversarial network (GAN) component complements the model's ability to learn diverse representations of existing intent classes through generative modeling. Our experimental results demonstrate that the GAN-BnBERT model achieves superior performance on the newly introduced BNIntent30 dataset, surpassing the existing Bi-LSTM and the stand-alone BERT-based classification model.
Incremental Learning (IL) has been a long-standing problem in both vision and Natural Language Processing (NLP) communities. In recent years, as Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) have achieved remarkable progress in various NLP downstream tasks, utilizing PLMs as backbones has become a common practice in recent research of IL in NLP. Most assume that catastrophic forgetting is the biggest obstacle to achieving superior IL performance and propose various techniques to overcome this issue. However, we find that this assumption is problematic. Specifically, we revisit more than 20 methods on four classification tasks (Text Classification, Intent Classification, Relation Extraction, and Named Entity Recognition) under the two most popular IL settings (Class-Incremental and Task-Incremental) and reveal that most of them severely underestimate the inherent anti-forgetting ability of PLMs. Based on the observation, we propose a frustratingly easy method called SEQ* for IL with PLMs. The results show that SEQ* has competitive or superior performance compared to state-of-the-art (SOTA) IL methods and requires considerably less trainable parameters and training time. These findings urge us to revisit the IL with PLMs and encourage future studies to have a fundamental understanding of the catastrophic forgetting in PLMs. The data, code and scripts are publicly available at https://github.com/zzz47zzz/codebase-for-incremental-learning-with-llm.