Balanced Joint Adversarial Training for Robust Intent Detection and Slot Filling

Xu Cao, Deyi Xiong, Chongyang Shi, Chao Wang, Yao Meng, Changjian Hu


Abstract
Joint intent detection and slot filling has recently achieved tremendous success in advancing the performance of utterance understanding. However, many joint models still suffer from the robustness problem, especially on noisy inputs or rare/unseen events. To address this issue, we propose a Joint Adversarial Training (JAT) model to improve the robustness of joint intent detection and slot filling, which consists of two parts: (1) automatically generating joint adversarial examples to attack the joint model, and (2) training the model to defend against the joint adversarial examples so as to robustify the model on small perturbations. As the generated joint adversarial examples have different impacts on the intent detection and slot filling loss, we further propose a Balanced Joint Adversarial Training (BJAT) model that applies a balance factor as a regularization term to the final loss function, which yields a stable training procedure. Extensive experiments and analyses on the lightweight models show that our proposed methods achieve significantly higher scores and substantially improve the robustness of both intent detection and slot filling. In addition, the combination of our BJAT with BERT-large achieves state-of-the-art results on two datasets.
Anthology ID:
2020.coling-main.432
Volume:
Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Month:
December
Year:
2020
Address:
Barcelona, Spain (Online)
Editors:
Donia Scott, Nuria Bel, Chengqing Zong
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
International Committee on Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
4926–4936
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.coling-main.432
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.coling-main.432
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Xu Cao, Deyi Xiong, Chongyang Shi, Chao Wang, Yao Meng, and Changjian Hu. 2020. Balanced Joint Adversarial Training for Robust Intent Detection and Slot Filling. In Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 4926–4936, Barcelona, Spain (Online). International Committee on Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Balanced Joint Adversarial Training for Robust Intent Detection and Slot Filling (Cao et al., COLING 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.coling-main.432.pdf
Data
SNIPS