2021/03/16 by Zengfeng Zeng, Zeng, Zengfeng, Dan Ma +7 · 1 citation
Computer Science · #Advanced Text Analysis Techniques #Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI) #Computation and Language (cs.CL) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Natural Language Processing Techniques #Topic Modeling #cs.AI #cs.CL
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2103.08886
12 pages, 11 figures, 6 tables, in WWW'21
arxiv created 2021/03/16 · openalex publication_date 2021/03/16 · arxiv updated 2021/03/17 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Automatically and accurately identifying user intents and filling the associated slots from their spoken language are critical to the success of dialogue systems. Traditional methods require manually defining the DOMAIN-INTENT-SLOT schema and asking many domain experts to annotate the corresponding utterances, upon which neural models are trained. This procedure brings the challenges of information sharing hindering, out-of-schema, or data sparsity in open-domain dialogue systems. To tackle these challenges, we explore a new task of \em automatic intent-slot induction and propose a novel domain-independent tool. That is, we design a coarse-to-fine three-step procedure including Role-labeling, Concept-mining, And Pattern-mining (RCAP): (1) role-labeling: extracting keyphrases from users' utterances and classifying them into a quadruple of coarsely-defined intent-roles via sequence labeling; (2) concept-mining: clustering the extracted intent-role mentions and naming them into abstract fine-grained concepts; (3) pattern-mining: applying the Apriori algorithm to mine intent-role patterns and automatically inferring the intent-slot using these coarse-grained intent-role labels and fine-grained concepts. Empirical evaluations on both real-world in-domain and out-of-domain datasets show that: (1) our RCAP can generate satisfactory SLU schema and outperforms the state-of-the-art supervised learning method; (2) our RCAP can be directly applied to out-of-domain datasets and gain at least 76% improvement of F1-score on intent detection and 41% improvement of F1-score on slot filling; (3) our RCAP exhibits its power in generic intent-slot extractions with less manual effort, which opens pathways for schema induction on new domains and unseen intent-slot discovery for generalizable dialogue systems.