Diverse data is crucial for training robust models, but crowdsourced text often lacks diversity as workers tend to write simple variations from prompts. We propose a general approach for guiding workers to write more diverse text by iteratively constraining their writing. We show how prior workflows are special cases of our approach, and present a way to apply the approach to dialog tasks such as intent classification and slot-filling. Using our method, we create more challenging versions of test sets from prior dialog datasets and find dramatic performance drops for standard models. Finally, we show that our approach is complementary to recent work on improving data diversity, and training on data collected with our approach leads to more robust models.

Typical machine learning approaches to developing task-oriented dialog systems require the collection and management of large amounts of training data, especially for the tasks of intent classification and slot-filling. Managing this data can be cumbersome without dedicated tools to help the dialog system designer understand the nature of the data. This paper presents a toolkit for analyzing slot-filling and intent classification corpora. We present a toolkit that includes (1) a new lightweight and readable data and file format for intent classification and slot-filling corpora, (2) a new query language for searching intent classification and slot-filling corpora, and (3) tools for understanding the structure and makeup for such corpora. We apply our toolkit to several well-known NLU datasets, and demonstrate that our toolkit can be used to uncover interesting and surprising insights. By releasing our toolkit to the research community, we hope to enable others to develop more robust and intelligent slot-filling and intent classification models.