NLU++: A Multi-Label, Slot-Rich, Generalisable Dataset for Natural Language Understanding in Task-Oriented Dialogue

Inigo Casanueva, Ivan Vulić, Georgios Spithourakis, Paweł Budzianowski


Abstract
We present NLU++, a novel dataset for natural language understanding (NLU) in task-oriented dialogue (ToD) systems, with the aim to provide a much more challenging evaluation environment for dialogue NLU models, up to date with the current application and industry requirements. NLU++ is divided into two domains (BANKING and HOTELS) and brings several crucial improvements over current commonly used NLU datasets. 1) NLU++ provides fine-grained domain ontologies with a large set of challenging multi-intent sentences combined with finer-grained and thus more challenging slot sets. 2) The ontology is divided into domain-specific and generic (i.e., domain-universal) intents that overlap across domains, promoting cross-domain reusability of annotated examples. 3) The dataset design has been inspired by the problems observed in industrial ToD systems, and 4) it has been collected, filtered and carefully annotated by dialogue NLU experts, yielding high-quality annotated data. Finally, we benchmark a series of current state-of-the-art NLU models on NLU++; the results demonstrate the challenging nature of the dataset, especially in low-data regimes, and call for further research on ToD NLU.
Anthology ID:
2022.findings-naacl.154
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2022
Month:
July
Year:
2022
Address:
Seattle, United States
Editors:
Marine Carpuat, Marie-Catherine de Marneffe, Ivan Vladimir Meza Ruiz
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1998–2013
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.findings-naacl.154
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.findings-naacl.154
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Inigo Casanueva, Ivan Vulić, Georgios Spithourakis, and Paweł Budzianowski. 2022. NLU++: A Multi-Label, Slot-Rich, Generalisable Dataset for Natural Language Understanding in Task-Oriented Dialogue. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2022, pages 1998–2013, Seattle, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
NLU++: A Multi-Label, Slot-Rich, Generalisable Dataset for Natural Language Understanding in Task-Oriented Dialogue (Casanueva et al., Findings 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.findings-naacl.154.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2022.findings-naacl.154.mp4
Code
 PolyAI-LDN/task-specific-datasets
Data
NLU++ATISBANKING77SNIPSSQuAD