We introduce ClusterLLM, a novel text clustering framework that leverages feedback from an instruction-tuned large language model, such as ChatGPT. Compared with traditional unsupervised methods that builds upon “small” embedders, ClusterLLM exhibits two intriguing advantages: (1) it enjoys the emergent capability of LLM even if its embeddings are inaccessible; and (2) it understands the user’s preference on clustering through textual instruction and/or a few annotated data. First, we prompt ChatGPT for insights on clustering perspective by constructing hard triplet questions <does A better correspond to B than C>, where A, B and C are similar data points that belong to different clusters according to small embedder. We empirically show that this strategy is both effective for fine-tuning small embedder and cost-efficient to query ChatGPT. Second, we prompt ChatGPT for helps on clustering granularity by carefully designed pairwise questions <do A and B belong to the same category>, and tune the granularity from cluster hierarchies that is the most consistent with the ChatGPT answers. Extensive experiments on 14 datasets show that ClusterLLM consistently improves clustering quality, at an average cost of ~$0.6 per dataset.

New intent discovery aims to uncover novel intent categories from user utterances to expand the set of supported intent classes. It is a critical task for the development and service expansion of a practical dialogue system. Despite its importance, this problem remains under-explored in the literature. Existing approaches typically rely on a large amount of labeled utterances and employ pseudo-labeling methods for representation learning and clustering, which are label-intensive, inefficient, and inaccurate. In this paper, we provide new solutions to two important research questions for new intent discovery: (1) how to learn semantic utterance representations and (2) how to better cluster utterances. Particularly, we first propose a multi-task pre-training strategy to leverage rich unlabeled data along with external labeled data for representation learning. Then, we design a new contrastive loss to exploit self-supervisory signals in unlabeled data for clustering. Extensive experiments on three intent recognition benchmarks demonstrate the high effectiveness of our proposed method, which outperforms state-of-the-art methods by a large margin in both unsupervised and semi-supervised scenarios. The source code will be available at https://github.com/zhang-yu-wei/MTP-CLNN.

It is challenging to train a good intent classifier for a task-oriented dialogue system with only a few annotations. Recent studies have shown that fine-tuning pre-trained language models with a small set of labeled utterances from public benchmarks in a supervised manner is extremely helpful. However, we find that supervised pre-training yields an anisotropic feature space, which may suppress the expressive power of the semantic representations. Inspired by recent research in isotropization, we propose to improve supervised pre-training by regularizing the feature space towards isotropy. We propose two regularizers based on contrastive learning and correlation matrix respectively, and demonstrate their effectiveness through extensive experiments. Our main finding is that it is promising to regularize supervised pre-training with isotropization to further improve the performance of few-shot intent detection. The source code can be found at https://github.com/fanolabs/isoIntentBert-main.

This paper investigates the effectiveness of pre-training for few-shot intent classification. While existing paradigms commonly further pre-train language models such as BERT on a vast amount of unlabeled corpus, we find it highly effective and efficient to simply fine-tune BERT with a small set of labeled utterances from public datasets. Specifically, fine-tuning BERT with roughly 1,000 labeled data yields a pre-trained model – IntentBERT, which can easily surpass the performance of existing pre-trained models for few-shot intent classification on novel domains with very different semantics. The high effectiveness of IntentBERT confirms the feasibility and practicality of few-shot intent detection, and its high generalization ability across different domains suggests that intent classification tasks may share a similar underlying structure, which can be efficiently learned from a small set of labeled data. The source code can be found at https://github.com/hdzhang-code/IntentBERT.