A Probabilistic Framework for Discovering New Intents

Yunhua Zhou, Guofeng Quan, Xipeng Qiu


Abstract
Discovering new intents is of great significance for establishing the Task-Oriented Dialogue System. Most existing methods either cannot transfer prior knowledge contained in known intents or fall into the dilemma of forgetting prior knowledge in the follow-up. Furthermore, these methods do not deeply explore the intrinsic structure of unlabeled data, and as a result, cannot seek out the characteristics that define an intent in general. In this paper, starting from the intuition that discovering intents could be beneficial for identifying known intents, we propose a probabilistic framework for discovering intents where intent assignments are treated as latent variables. We adopt the Expectation Maximization framework for optimization. Specifically, In the E-step, we conduct intent discovery and explore the intrinsic structure of unlabeled data by the posterior of intent assignments. In the M-step, we alleviate the forgetting of prior knowledge transferred from known intents by optimizing the discrimination of labeled data. Extensive experiments conducted on three challenging real-world datasets demonstrate the generality and effectiveness of the proposed framework and implementation.
Anthology ID:
2023.acl-long.209
Volume:
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Editors:
Anna Rogers, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Naoaki Okazaki
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
3771–3784
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.209
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.acl-long.209
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yunhua Zhou, Guofeng Quan, and Xipeng Qiu. 2023. A Probabilistic Framework for Discovering New Intents. In Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 3771–3784, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
A Probabilistic Framework for Discovering New Intents (Zhou et al., ACL 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.209.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.209.mp4