Novel Slot Detection: A Benchmark for Discovering Unknown Slot Types in the Task-Oriented Dialogue System

Yanan Wu, Zhiyuan Zeng, Keqing He, Hong Xu, Yuanmeng Yan, Huixing Jiang, Weiran Xu


Abstract
Existing slot filling models can only recognize pre-defined in-domain slot types from a limited slot set. In the practical application, a reliable dialogue system should know what it does not know. In this paper, we introduce a new task, Novel Slot Detection (NSD), in the task-oriented dialogue system. NSD aims to discover unknown or out-of-domain slot types to strengthen the capability of a dialogue system based on in-domain training data. Besides, we construct two public NSD datasets, propose several strong NSD baselines, and establish a benchmark for future work. Finally, we conduct exhaustive experiments and qualitative analysis to comprehend key challenges and provide new guidance for future directions.
Anthology ID:
2021.acl-long.270
Volume:
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
August
Year:
2021
Address:
Online
Editors:
Chengqing Zong, Fei Xia, Wenjie Li, Roberto Navigli
Venues:
ACL | IJCNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
3484–3494
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-long.270
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.acl-long.270
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yanan Wu, Zhiyuan Zeng, Keqing He, Hong Xu, Yuanmeng Yan, Huixing Jiang, and Weiran Xu. 2021. Novel Slot Detection: A Benchmark for Discovering Unknown Slot Types in the Task-Oriented Dialogue System. In Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 3484–3494, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Novel Slot Detection: A Benchmark for Discovering Unknown Slot Types in the Task-Oriented Dialogue System (Wu et al., ACL-IJCNLP 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-long.270.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-long.270.mp4
Code
 ChestnutWYN/ACL2021-Novel-Slot-Detection
Data
ATISSNIPS