Benchmarking the Covariate Shift Robustness of Open-world Intent Classification Approaches

Sopan Khosla, Rashmi Gangadharaiah


Abstract
Task-oriented dialog systems deployed in real-world applications are often challenged by out-of-distribution queries. These systems should not only reliably detect utterances with unsupported intents (semantic shift), but also generalize to covariate shift (supported intents from unseen distributions). However, none of the existing benchmarks for open-world intent classification focus on the second aspect, thus only performing a partial evaluation of intent detection techniques. In this work, we propose two new datasets ( and ) that include utterances useful for evaluating the robustness of open-world models to covariate shift. Along with the i.i.d. test set, both datasets contain a new cov-test set that, along with out-of-scope utterances, contains in-scope utterances sampled from different distributions not seen during training. This setting better mimics the challenges faced in real-world applications. Evaluating several open-world classifiers on the new datasets reveals that models that perform well on the test set struggle to generalize to the cov-test. Our datasets fill an important gap in the field, offering a more realistic evaluation scenario for intent classification in task-oriented dialog systems.
Anthology ID:
2022.aacl-short.3
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2nd Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 12th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 2: Short Papers)
Month:
November
Year:
2022
Address:
Online only
Editors:
Yulan He, Heng Ji, Sujian Li, Yang Liu, Chua-Hui Chang
Venues:
AACL | IJCNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
14–23
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.aacl-short.3
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Sopan Khosla and Rashmi Gangadharaiah. 2022. Benchmarking the Covariate Shift Robustness of Open-world Intent Classification Approaches. In Proceedings of the 2nd Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 12th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 2: Short Papers), pages 14–23, Online only. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Benchmarking the Covariate Shift Robustness of Open-world Intent Classification Approaches (Khosla & Gangadharaiah, AACL-IJCNLP 2022)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.aacl-short.3.pdf