Intent Detection in the Age of LLMs

Gaurav Arora, Shreya Jain, Srujana Merugu


Abstract
Intent detection is a critical component of task-oriented dialogue systems (TODS) which enables the identification of suitable actions to address user utterances at each dialog turn. Traditional approaches relied on computationally efficient supervised sentence transformer encoder models, which require substantial training data and struggle with out-of-scope (OOS) detection. The emergence of generative large language models (LLMs) with intrinsic world knowledge presents new opportunities to address these challenges.In this work, we adapt SOTA LLMs using adaptive in-context learning and chain-of-thought prompting for intent detection, and compare their performance with contrastively fine-tuned sentence transformer (SetFit) models to highlight prediction quality and latency tradeoff. We propose a hybrid system using uncertainty based routing strategy to combine the two approaches that along with negative data augmentation results in achieving the best of both worlds ( i.e. within 2% of native LLM accuracy with 50% less latency). To better understand LLM OOS detection capabilities, we perform controlled experiments revealing that this capability is significantly influenced by the scope of intent labels and the size of the label space. We also introduce a two-step approach utilizing internal LLM representations, demonstrating empirical gains in OOS detection accuracy and F1-score by >5% for the Mistral-7B model.
Anthology ID:
2024.emnlp-industry.114
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: Industry Track
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, US
Editors:
Franck Dernoncourt, Daniel Preoţiuc-Pietro, Anastasia Shimorina
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1559–1570
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-industry.114
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Gaurav Arora, Shreya Jain, and Srujana Merugu. 2024. Intent Detection in the Age of LLMs. In Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: Industry Track, pages 1559–1570, Miami, Florida, US. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Intent Detection in the Age of LLMs (Arora et al., EMNLP 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-industry.114.pdf