LINGUIST: Language Model Instruction Tuning to Generate Annotated Utterances for Intent Classification and Slot Tagging

Andy Rosenbaum, Saleh Soltan, Wael Hamza, Yannick Versley, Markus Boese


Abstract
We present LINGUIST, a method for generating annotated data for Intent Classification and Slot Tagging (IC+ST), via fine-tuning AlexaTM 5B, a 5-billion-parameter multilingual sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) model, on a flexible instruction prompt. In a 10-shot novel intent setting for the SNIPS dataset, LINGUIST surpasses state-of-the-art approaches (Back-Translation and Example Extrapolation) by a wide margin, showing absolute improvement for the target intents of +1.9 points on IC Recall and +2.5 points on ST F1 Score. In the zero-shot cross-lingual setting of the mATIS++ dataset, LINGUIST out-performs a strong baseline of Machine Translation with Slot Alignment by +4.14 points absolute on ST F1 Score across 6 languages, while matching performance on IC. Finally, we verify our results on an internal large-scale multilingual dataset for conversational agent IC+ST and show significant improvements over a baseline which uses Back-Translation, Paraphrasing and Slot Catalog Resampling. To our knowledge, we are the first to demonstrate instruction fine-tuning of a large-scale seq2seq model to control the outputs of multilingual intent- and slot-labeled data generation.
Anthology ID:
2022.coling-1.18
Volume:
Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Month:
October
Year:
2022
Address:
Gyeongju, Republic of Korea
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Chu-Ren Huang, Hansaem Kim, James Pustejovsky, Leo Wanner, Key-Sun Choi, Pum-Mo Ryu, Hsin-Hsi Chen, Lucia Donatelli, Heng Ji, Sadao Kurohashi, Patrizia Paggio, Nianwen Xue, Seokhwan Kim, Younggyun Hahm, Zhong He, Tony Kyungil Lee, Enrico Santus, Francis Bond, Seung-Hoon Na
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
International Committee on Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
218–241
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.coling-1.18
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Andy Rosenbaum, Saleh Soltan, Wael Hamza, Yannick Versley, and Markus Boese. 2022. LINGUIST: Language Model Instruction Tuning to Generate Annotated Utterances for Intent Classification and Slot Tagging. In Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 218–241, Gyeongju, Republic of Korea. International Committee on Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
LINGUIST: Language Model Instruction Tuning to Generate Annotated Utterances for Intent Classification and Slot Tagging (Rosenbaum et al., COLING 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.coling-1.18.pdf
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