An Explicit-Joint and Supervised-Contrastive Learning Framework for Few-Shot Intent Classification and Slot Filling

Han Liu, Feng Zhang, Xiaotong Zhang, Siyang Zhao, Xianchao Zhang


Abstract
Intent classification (IC) and slot filling (SF) are critical building blocks in task-oriented dialogue systems. These two tasks are closely-related and can flourish each other. Since only a few utterances can be utilized for identifying fast-emerging new intents and slots, data scarcity issue often occurs when implementing IC and SF. However, few IC/SF models perform well when the number of training samples per class is quite small. In this paper, we propose a novel explicit-joint and supervised-contrastive learning framework for few-shot intent classification and slot filling. Its highlights are as follows. (i) The model extracts intent and slot representations via bidirectional interactions, and extends prototypical network to achieve explicit-joint learning, which guarantees that IC and SF tasks can mutually reinforce each other. (ii) The model integrates with supervised contrastive learning, which ensures that samples from same class are pulled together and samples from different classes are pushed apart. In addition, the model follows a not common but practical way to construct the episode, which gets rid of the traditional setting with fixed way and shot, and allows for unbalanced datasets. Extensive experiments on three public datasets show that our model can achieve promising performance.
Anthology ID:
2021.findings-emnlp.167
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2021
Month:
November
Year:
2021
Address:
Punta Cana, Dominican Republic
Editors:
Marie-Francine Moens, Xuanjing Huang, Lucia Specia, Scott Wen-tau Yih
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1945–1955
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.findings-emnlp.167
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.findings-emnlp.167
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Han Liu, Feng Zhang, Xiaotong Zhang, Siyang Zhao, and Xianchao Zhang. 2021. An Explicit-Joint and Supervised-Contrastive Learning Framework for Few-Shot Intent Classification and Slot Filling. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2021, pages 1945–1955, Punta Cana, Dominican Republic. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
An Explicit-Joint and Supervised-Contrastive Learning Framework for Few-Shot Intent Classification and Slot Filling (Liu et al., Findings 2021)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.findings-emnlp.167.pdf
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 https://aclanthology.org/2021.findings-emnlp.167.mp4