New Intent Discovery with Pre-training and Contrastive Learning

Yuwei Zhang, Haode Zhang, Li-Ming Zhan, Xiao-Ming Wu, Albert Lam


Abstract
New intent discovery aims to uncover novel intent categories from user utterances to expand the set of supported intent classes. It is a critical task for the development and service expansion of a practical dialogue system. Despite its importance, this problem remains under-explored in the literature. Existing approaches typically rely on a large amount of labeled utterances and employ pseudo-labeling methods for representation learning and clustering, which are label-intensive, inefficient, and inaccurate. In this paper, we provide new solutions to two important research questions for new intent discovery: (1) how to learn semantic utterance representations and (2) how to better cluster utterances. Particularly, we first propose a multi-task pre-training strategy to leverage rich unlabeled data along with external labeled data for representation learning. Then, we design a new contrastive loss to exploit self-supervisory signals in unlabeled data for clustering. Extensive experiments on three intent recognition benchmarks demonstrate the high effectiveness of our proposed method, which outperforms state-of-the-art methods by a large margin in both unsupervised and semi-supervised scenarios. The source code will be available at https://github.com/zhang-yu-wei/MTP-CLNN.
Anthology ID:
2022.acl-long.21
Volume:
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
May
Year:
2022
Address:
Dublin, Ireland
Editors:
Smaranda Muresan, Preslav Nakov, Aline Villavicencio
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
256–269
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.acl-long.21
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.acl-long.21
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yuwei Zhang, Haode Zhang, Li-Ming Zhan, Xiao-Ming Wu, and Albert Lam. 2022. New Intent Discovery with Pre-training and Contrastive Learning. In Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 256–269, Dublin, Ireland. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
New Intent Discovery with Pre-training and Contrastive Learning (Zhang et al., ACL 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.acl-long.21.pdf
Code
 zhang-yu-wei/mtp-clnn
Data
CLINC150