Related papers: Improving Dialectal Slot and Intent Detection with…

The ability of transformers to perform precision tasks such as question answering, Natural Language Inference (NLI) or summarising, have enabled them to be ranked as one of the best paradigm to address Natural Language Processing (NLP)…

Few-shot learning arises in important practical scenarios, such as when a natural language understanding system needs to learn new semantic labels for an emerging, resource-scarce domain. In this paper, we explore retrieval-based methods…

Slot labeling (SL) is a core component of task-oriented dialogue (ToD) systems, where slots and corresponding values are usually language-, task- and domain-specific. Therefore, extending the system to any new language-domain-task…

Detecting and identifying user intent from text, both written and spoken, plays an important role in modelling and understand dialogs. Existing research for intent discovery model it as a classification task with a predefined set of known…

Detecting out-of-scope (OOS) user utterances remains a key challenge in task-oriented dialogue systems and, more broadly, in open-set intent recognition. Existing approaches often depend on strong distributional assumptions or auxiliary…

This paper investigates the effectiveness of pre-training for few-shot intent classification. While existing paradigms commonly further pre-train language models such as BERT on a vast amount of unlabeled corpus, we find it highly effective…

Multilingual BERT (mBERT) has shown reasonable capability for zero-shot cross-lingual transfer when fine-tuned on downstream tasks. Since mBERT is not pre-trained with explicit cross-lingual supervision, transfer performance can further be…

In this paper, we investigate few-shot joint learning for dialogue language understanding. Most existing few-shot models learn a single task each time with only a few examples. However, dialogue language understanding contains two closely…

Multi-Intent Spoken Language Understanding (SLU), a novel and more complex scenario of SLU, is attracting increasing attention. Unlike traditional SLU, each intent in this scenario has its specific scope. Semantic information outside the…

Intent detection is a crucial task in any Natural Language Understanding (NLU) system and forms the foundation of a task-oriented dialogue system. To build high-quality real-world conversational solutions for edge devices, there is a need…

Slot filling and intent detection are two highly correlated tasks in spoken language understanding (SLU). Recent SLU research attempts to explore zero-shot prompting techniques in large language models to alleviate the data scarcity…

People are becoming increasingly comfortable using Digital Assistants (DAs) to interact with services or connected objects. However, for non-programming users, the available possibilities for customizing their DA are limited and do not…

Inspired by recent work in meta-learning and generative teaching networks, we propose a framework called Generative Conversational Networks, in which conversational agents learn to generate their own labelled training data (given some seed…

We investigate the emergent abilities of the recently proposed web-scale speech model Whisper, by adapting it to unseen tasks with prompt engineering. We selected three tasks: audio-visual speech recognition (AVSR), code-switched speech…

Intermediate task fine-tuning has been shown to culminate in large transfer gains across many NLP tasks. With an abundance of candidate datasets as well as pre-trained language models, it has become infeasible to run the cross-product of…

Stance Detection (SD) has become a critical area of interest due to its applications in various contexts leading to increased research within NLP. Yet the subtlety and complexity of texts sourced from online platforms often containing…

Spoken language identification (LID) technologies have improved in recent years from discriminating largely distinct languages to discriminating highly similar languages or even dialects of the same language. One aspect that has been mostly…

Scaling semantic parsing models for task-oriented dialog systems to new languages is often expensive and time-consuming due to the lack of available datasets. Available datasets suffer from several shortcomings: a) they contain few…

Complex Word Identification (CWI) is a task centered on detecting hard-to-understand words, or groups of words, in texts from different areas of expertise. The purpose of CWI is to highlight problematic structures that non-native speakers…

Natural language understanding includes the tasks of intent detection (identifying a user's objectives) and slot filling (extracting the entities relevant to those objectives). Prior slot filling methods assume that each intent type cannot…