Effectiveness of Pre-training for Few-shot Intent Classification

Haode Zhang, Yuwei Zhang, Li-Ming Zhan, Jiaxin Chen, Guangyuan Shi, Xiao-Ming Wu, Albert Y.S. Lam


Abstract
This paper investigates the effectiveness of pre-training for few-shot intent classification. While existing paradigms commonly further pre-train language models such as BERT on a vast amount of unlabeled corpus, we find it highly effective and efficient to simply fine-tune BERT with a small set of labeled utterances from public datasets. Specifically, fine-tuning BERT with roughly 1,000 labeled data yields a pre-trained model – IntentBERT, which can easily surpass the performance of existing pre-trained models for few-shot intent classification on novel domains with very different semantics. The high effectiveness of IntentBERT confirms the feasibility and practicality of few-shot intent detection, and its high generalization ability across different domains suggests that intent classification tasks may share a similar underlying structure, which can be efficiently learned from a small set of labeled data. The source code can be found at https://github.com/hdzhang-code/IntentBERT.
Anthology ID:
2021.findings-emnlp.96
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:
1114–1120
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.findings-emnlp.96
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.findings-emnlp.96
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Haode Zhang, Yuwei Zhang, Li-Ming Zhan, Jiaxin Chen, Guangyuan Shi, Xiao-Ming Wu, and Albert Y.S. Lam. 2021. Effectiveness of Pre-training for Few-shot Intent Classification. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2021, pages 1114–1120, Punta Cana, Dominican Republic. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Effectiveness of Pre-training for Few-shot Intent Classification (Zhang et al., Findings 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.findings-emnlp.96.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2021.findings-emnlp.96.mp4
Data
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