Zero-shot User Intent Detection via Capsule Neural Networks
Congying Xia, Chenwei Zhang, Xiaohui Yan, Yi Chang, Philip Yu
Abstract
User intent detection plays a critical role in question-answering and dialog systems. Most previous works treat intent detection as a classification problem where utterances are labeled with predefined intents. However, it is labor-intensive and time-consuming to label users’ utterances as intents are diversely expressed and novel intents will continually be involved. Instead, we study the zero-shot intent detection problem, which aims to detect emerging user intents where no labeled utterances are currently available. We propose two capsule-based architectures: IntentCapsNet that extracts semantic features from utterances and aggregates them to discriminate existing intents, and IntentCapsNet-ZSL which gives IntentCapsNet the zero-shot learning ability to discriminate emerging intents via knowledge transfer from existing intents. Experiments on two real-world datasets show that our model not only can better discriminate diversely expressed existing intents, but is also able to discriminate emerging intents when no labeled utterances are available.- Anthology ID:
- D18-1348
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
- Month:
- October-November
- Year:
- 2018
- Address:
- Brussels, Belgium
- Editors:
- Ellen Riloff, David Chiang, Julia Hockenmaier, Jun’ichi Tsujii
- Venue:
- EMNLP
- SIG:
- SIGDAT
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 3090–3099
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/D18-1348
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/D18-1348
- Cite (ACL):
- Congying Xia, Chenwei Zhang, Xiaohui Yan, Yi Chang, and Philip Yu. 2018. Zero-shot User Intent Detection via Capsule Neural Networks. In Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 3090–3099, Brussels, Belgium. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Zero-shot User Intent Detection via Capsule Neural Networks (Xia et al., EMNLP 2018)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/teach-a-man-to-fish/D18-1348.pdf
- Code
- additional community code