Large Language Models Meet Open-World Intent Discovery and Recognition: An Evaluation of ChatGPT

Xiaoshuai Song, Keqing He, Pei Wang, Guanting Dong, Yutao Mou, Jingang Wang, Yunsen Xian, Xunliang Cai, Weiran Xu


Abstract
The tasks of out-of-domain (OOD) intent discovery and generalized intent discovery (GID) aim to extend a closed intent classifier to open-world intent sets, which is crucial to task-oriented dialogue (TOD) systems. Previous methods address them by fine-tuning discriminative models. Recently, although some studies has been exploring the application of large language models (LLMs) represented by ChatGPT to various downstream tasks, it is still unclear for the ability of ChatGPT to discover and incrementally extent OOD intents. In this paper, we comprehensively evaluate ChatGPT on OOD intent discovery and GID, and then outline the strengths and weaknesses of ChatGPT. Overall, ChatGPT exhibits consistent advantages under zero-shot settings, but is still at a disadvantage compared to fine-tuned models. More deeply, through a series of analytical experiments, we summarize and discuss the challenges faced by LLMs including clustering, domain-specific understanding, and cross-domain in-context learning scenarios. Finally, we provide empirical guidance for future directions to address these challenges.
Anthology ID:
2023.emnlp-main.636
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
10291–10304
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/build-pipeline-with-new-library/2023.emnlp-main.636/
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.emnlp-main.636
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Xiaoshuai Song, Keqing He, Pei Wang, Guanting Dong, Yutao Mou, Jingang Wang, Yunsen Xian, Xunliang Cai, and Weiran Xu. 2023. Large Language Models Meet Open-World Intent Discovery and Recognition: An Evaluation of ChatGPT. In Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 10291–10304, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Large Language Models Meet Open-World Intent Discovery and Recognition: An Evaluation of ChatGPT (Song et al., EMNLP 2023)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/build-pipeline-with-new-library/2023.emnlp-main.636.pdf
Video:
 https://preview.aclanthology.org/build-pipeline-with-new-library/2023.emnlp-main.636.mp4