We present IndoNLI, the first human-elicited NLI dataset for Indonesian. We adapt the data collection protocol for MNLI and collect ~18K sentence pairs annotated by crowd workers and experts. The expert-annotated data is used exclusively as a test set. It is designed to provide a challenging test-bed for Indonesian NLI by explicitly incorporating various linguistic phenomena such as numerical reasoning, structural changes, idioms, or temporal and spatial reasoning. Experiment results show that XLM-R outperforms other pre-trained models in our data. The best performance on the expert-annotated data is still far below human performance (13.4% accuracy gap), suggesting that this test set is especially challenging. Furthermore, our analysis shows that our expert-annotated data is more diverse and contains fewer annotation artifacts than the crowd-annotated data. We hope this dataset can help accelerate progress in Indonesian NLP research.

In recent years, fostered by deep learning technologies and by the high demand for conversational AI, various approaches have been proposed that address the capacity to elicit and understand user’s needs in task-oriented dialogue systems. We focus on two core tasks, slot filling (SF) and intent classification (IC), and survey how neural based models have rapidly evolved to address natural language understanding in dialogue systems. We introduce three neural architectures: independent models, which model SF and IC separately, joint models, which exploit the mutual benefit of the two tasks simultaneously, and transfer learning models, that scale the model to new domains. We discuss the current state of the research in SF and IC, and highlight challenges that still require attention.

Although several works have addressed the role of data selection to improve transfer learning for various NLP tasks, there is no consensus about its real benefits and, more generally, there is a lack of shared practices on how it can be best applied. We propose a systematic approach aimed at evaluating data selection in scenarios of increasing complexity. Specifically, we compare the case in which source and target tasks are the same while source and target domains are different, against the more challenging scenario where both tasks and domains are different. We run a number of experiments on semantic sequence tagging tasks, which are relatively less investigated in data selection, and conclude that data selection has more benefit on the scenario when the tasks are the same, while in case of different (although related) tasks from distant domains, a combination of data selection and multi-task learning is ineffective for most cases.

Slot filling is a core operation for utterance understanding in task-oriented dialogue systems. Slots are typically domain-specific, and adding new domains to a dialogue system involves data and time-intensive processes. A popular technique to address the problem is transfer learning, where it is assumed the availability of a large slot filling dataset for the source domain, to be used to help slot filling on the target domain, with fewer data. In this work, instead, we propose to leverage source tasks based on semantically related non-conversational resources (e.g., semantic sequence tagging datasets), as they are both cheaper to obtain and reusable to several slot filling domains. We show that using auxiliary non-conversational tasks in a multi-task learning setup consistently improves low resource slot filling performance.

Most Semantic Role Labeling (SRL) approaches are supervised methods which require a significant amount of annotated corpus, and the annotation requires linguistic expertise. In this paper, we propose a Multi-Task Active Learning framework for Semantic Role Labeling with Entity Recognition (ER) as the auxiliary task to alleviate the need for extensive data and use additional information from ER to help SRL. We evaluate our approach on Indonesian conversational dataset. Our experiments show that multi-task active learning can outperform single-task active learning method and standard multi-task learning. According to our results, active learning is more efficient by using 12% less of training data compared to passive learning in both single-task and multi-task setting. We also introduce a new dataset for SRL in Indonesian conversational domain to encourage further research in this area.

Slot filling is a crucial task in the Natural Language Understanding (NLU) component of a dialogue system. Most approaches for this task rely solely on the domain-specific datasets for training. We propose a joint model of slot filling and Named Entity Recognition (NER) in a multi-task learning (MTL) setup. Our experiments on three slot filling datasets show that using NER as an auxiliary task improves slot filling performance and achieve competitive performance compared with state-of-the-art. In particular, NER is effective when supervised at the lower layer of the model. For low-resource scenarios, we found that MTL is effective for one dataset.

Despite the long history of named-entity recognition (NER) task in the natural language processing community, previous work rarely studied the task on conversational texts. Such texts are challenging because they contain a lot of word variations which increase the number of out-of-vocabulary (OOV) words. The high number of OOV words poses a difficulty for word-based neural models. Meanwhile, there is plenty of evidence to the effectiveness of character-based neural models in mitigating this OOV problem. We report an empirical evaluation of neural sequence labeling models with character embedding to tackle NER task in Indonesian conversational texts. Our experiments show that (1) character models outperform word embedding-only models by up to 4 F1 points, (2) character models perform better in OOV cases with an improvement of as high as 15 F1 points, and (3) character models are robust against a very high OOV rate.