The lack of publicly available evaluation data for low-resource languages limits progress in Spoken Language Understanding (SLU). As key tasks like intent classification and slot filling require abundant training data, it is desirable to reuse existing data in high-resource languages to develop models for low-resource scenarios. We introduce xSID, a new benchmark for cross-lingual (x) Slot and Intent Detection in 13 languages from 6 language families, including a very low-resource dialect. To tackle the challenge, we propose a joint learning approach, with English SLU training data and non-English auxiliary tasks from raw text, syntax and translation for transfer. We study two setups which differ by type and language coverage of the pre-trained embeddings. Our results show that jointly learning the main tasks with masked language modeling is effective for slots, while machine translation transfer works best for intent classification.

In recent years, named entity recognition (NER) tasks in the Indonesian language have undergone extensive development. There are only a few corpora for Indonesian NER; hence, recent Indonesian NER studies have used diverse datasets. Although an open dataset is available, it includes only approximately 2,000 sentences and contains inconsistent annotations, thereby preventing accurate training of NER models without reliance on pre-trained models. Therefore, we re-annotated the dataset and compared the two annotations’ performance using the Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory and Conditional Random Field (BiLSTM-CRF) approach. Fixing the annotation yielded a more consistent result for the organization tag and improved the prediction score by a large margin. Moreover, to take full advantage of pre-trained models, we compared different feature embeddings to determine their impact on the NER task for the Indonesian language.