English

Zero-shot User Intent Detection via Capsule Neural Networks

Computation and Language 2018-09-05 v1 Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

User intent detection plays a critical role in question-answering and dialog systems. Most previous works treat intent detection as a classification problem where utterances are labeled with predefined intents. However, it is labor-intensive and time-consuming to label users' utterances as intents are diversely expressed and novel intents will continually be involved. Instead, we study the zero-shot intent detection problem, which aims to detect emerging user intents where no labeled utterances are currently available. We propose two capsule-based architectures: INTENT-CAPSNET that extracts semantic features from utterances and aggregates them to discriminate existing intents, and INTENTCAPSNET-ZSL which gives INTENTCAPSNET the zero-shot learning ability to discriminate emerging intents via knowledge transfer from existing intents. Experiments on two real-world datasets show that our model not only can better discriminate diversely expressed existing intents, but is also able to discriminate emerging intents when no labeled utterances are available.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1809.00385,
  title  = {Zero-shot User Intent Detection via Capsule Neural Networks},
  author = {Congying Xia and Chenwei Zhang and Xiaohui Yan and Yi Chang and Philip S. Yu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1809.00385},
  year   = {2018}
}

Comments

In EMNLP 2018 as a long paper. Previously available on http://doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.2.11739.46889

R2 v1 2026-06-23T03:52:07.249Z