Concept Transfer Learning for Adaptive Language Understanding

Su Zhu, Kai Yu


Abstract
Concept definition is important in language understanding (LU) adaptation since literal definition difference can easily lead to data sparsity even if different data sets are actually semantically correlated. To address this issue, in this paper, a novel concept transfer learning approach is proposed. Here, substructures within literal concept definition are investigated to reveal the relationship between concepts. A hierarchical semantic representation for concepts is proposed, where a semantic slot is represented as a composition of atomic concepts. Based on this new hierarchical representation, transfer learning approaches are developed for adaptive LU. The approaches are applied to two tasks: value set mismatch and domain adaptation, and evaluated on two LU benchmarks: ATIS and DSTC 2&3. Thorough empirical studies validate both the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed method. In particular, we achieve state-of-the-art performance (F₁-score 96.08%) on ATIS by only using lexicon features.
Anthology ID:
W18-5047
Volume:
Proceedings of the 19th Annual SIGdial Meeting on Discourse and Dialogue
Month:
July
Year:
2018
Address:
Melbourne, Australia
Editors:
Kazunori Komatani, Diane Litman, Kai Yu, Alex Papangelis, Lawrence Cavedon, Mikio Nakano
Venue:
SIGDIAL
SIG:
SIGDIAL
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
391–399
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/W18-5047
DOI:
10.18653/v1/W18-5047
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Su Zhu and Kai Yu. 2018. Concept Transfer Learning for Adaptive Language Understanding. In Proceedings of the 19th Annual SIGdial Meeting on Discourse and Dialogue, pages 391–399, Melbourne, Australia. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Concept Transfer Learning for Adaptive Language Understanding (Zhu & Yu, SIGDIAL 2018)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-4/W18-5047.pdf
Data
ATIS