Intent detection is at the core of task-oriented dialogue systems. Existing intent detection systems are typically trained with a large amount of data over a predefined set of intent classes. However, newly emerged intents in multiple domains are commonplace in the real world. And it is time-consuming and impractical for dialogue systems to re-collect enough annotated data and re-train the model. These limitations call for an intent detection system that could continually recognize new intents with very few labeled examples. In this work, we study the Continual Few-shot Intent Detection (CFID) problem and construct a benchmark consisting of nine tasks with multiple domains and imbalanced classes. To address the key challenges of (a) catastrophic forgetting during continuous learning and (b) negative knowledge transfer across tasks, we propose the Prefix-guided Lightweight Encoder (PLE) with three auxiliary strategies, namely Pseudo Samples Replay (PSR), Teacher Knowledge Transfer (TKT) and Dynamic Weighting Replay (DWR). Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our method in preventing catastrophic forgetting and encouraging positive knowledge transfer across tasks.

Most recently proposed approaches in dialogue state tracking (DST) leverage the context and the last dialogue states to track current dialogue states, which are often slot-value pairs. Although the context contains the complete dialogue information, the information is usually indirect and even requires reasoning to obtain. The information in the lastly predicted dialogue states is direct, but when there is a prediction error, the dialogue information from this source will be incomplete or erroneous. In this paper, we propose the Dialogue State Tracking with Multi-Level Fusion of Predicted Dialogue States and Conversations network (FPDSC). This model extracts information of each dialogue turn by modeling interactions among each turn utterance, the corresponding last dialogue states, and dialogue slots. Then the representation of each dialogue turn is aggregated by a hierarchical structure to form the passage information, which is utilized in the current turn of DST. Experimental results validate the effectiveness of the fusion network with 55.03% and 59.07% joint accuracy on MultiWOZ 2.0 and MultiWOZ 2.1 datasets, which reaches the state-of-the-art performance. Furthermore, we conduct the deleted-value and related-slot experiments on MultiWOZ 2.1 to evaluate our model.