Abstract
User intent discovery is a key step in developing a Natural Language Understanding (NLU) module at the core of any modern Conversational AI system. Typically, human experts review a representative sample of user input data to discover new intents, which is subjective, costly, and error-prone. In this work, we aim to assist the NLU developers by presenting a novel method for discovering new intents at scale given a corpus of utterances. Our method utilizes supervised contrastive learning to leverage information from a domain-relevant, already labeled dataset and identifies new intents in the corpus at hand using unsupervised K-means clustering. Our method outperforms the state-of-the-art by a large margin up to 2% and 13% on two benchmark datasets, measured by clustering accuracy. Furthermore, we apply our method on a large dataset from the travel domain to demonstrate its effectiveness on a real-world use case.- Anthology ID:
- 2021.nlp4convai-1.12
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Natural Language Processing for Conversational AI
- Month:
- November
- Year:
- 2021
- Address:
- Online
- Editors:
- Alexandros Papangelis, Paweł Budzianowski, Bing Liu, Elnaz Nouri, Abhinav Rastogi, Yun-Nung Chen
- Venue:
- NLP4ConvAI
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 120–129
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2021.nlp4convai-1.12
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2021.nlp4convai-1.12
- Cite (ACL):
- Xiang Shen, Yinge Sun, Yao Zhang, and Mani Najmabadi. 2021. Semi-supervised Intent Discovery with Contrastive Learning. In Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Natural Language Processing for Conversational AI, pages 120–129, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Semi-supervised Intent Discovery with Contrastive Learning (Shen et al., NLP4ConvAI 2021)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl-2023-videos/2021.nlp4convai-1.12.pdf