Discriminative Nearest Neighbor Few-Shot Intent Detection by Transferring Natural Language Inference

Jianguo Zhang, Kazuma Hashimoto, Wenhao Liu, Chien-Sheng Wu, Yao Wan, Philip Yu, Richard Socher, Caiming Xiong


Abstract
Intent detection is one of the core components of goal-oriented dialog systems, and detecting out-of-scope (OOS) intents is also a practically important skill. Few-shot learning is attracting much attention to mitigate data scarcity, but OOS detection becomes even more challenging. In this paper, we present a simple yet effective approach, discriminative nearest neighbor classification with deep self-attention. Unlike softmax classifiers, we leverage BERT-style pairwise encoding to train a binary classifier that estimates the best matched training example for a user input. We propose to boost the discriminative ability by transferring a natural language inference (NLI) model. Our extensive experiments on a large-scale multi-domain intent detection task show that our method achieves more stable and accurate in-domain and OOS detection accuracy than RoBERTa-based classifiers and embedding-based nearest neighbor approaches. More notably, the NLI transfer enables our 10-shot model to perform competitively with 50-shot or even full-shot classifiers, while we can keep the inference time constant by leveraging a faster embedding retrieval model.
Anthology ID:
2020.emnlp-main.411
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)
Month:
November
Year:
2020
Address:
Online
Editors:
Bonnie Webber, Trevor Cohn, Yulan He, Yang Liu
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
5064–5082
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.emnlp-main.411
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.emnlp-main.411
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jianguo Zhang, Kazuma Hashimoto, Wenhao Liu, Chien-Sheng Wu, Yao Wan, Philip Yu, Richard Socher, and Caiming Xiong. 2020. Discriminative Nearest Neighbor Few-Shot Intent Detection by Transferring Natural Language Inference. In Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), pages 5064–5082, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Discriminative Nearest Neighbor Few-Shot Intent Detection by Transferring Natural Language Inference (Zhang et al., EMNLP 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.emnlp-main.411.pdf
Video:
 https://slideslive.com/38939288
Code
 salesforce/DNNC-few-shot-intent
Data
CLINC150MultiNLI