Papers › CTRAN: CNN-Transformer-based Network for Natural Language Understanding

CTRAN: CNN-Transformer-based Network for Natural Language Understanding

19 Mar 2023arXiv:2303.10606archive 2025-07-28

Mehrdad Rafiepour, Javad Salimi Sartakhti

Intent-detection and slot-filling are the two main tasks in natural language understanding. In this study, we propose CTRAN, a novel encoder-decoder CNN-Transformer-based architecture for intent-detection and slot-filling. In the encoder, we use BERT, followed by several convolutional layers, and rearrange the output using window feature sequence. We use stacked Transformer encoders after the window feature sequence. For the intent-detection decoder, we utilize self-attention followed by a linear layer. In the slot-filling decoder, we introduce the aligned Transformer decoder, which utilizes a zero diagonal mask, aligning output tags with input tokens. We apply our network on ATIS and SNIPS, and surpass the current state-of-the-art in slot-filling on both datasets. Furthermore, we incorporate the language model as word embeddings, and show that this strategy yields a better result when compared to the language model as an encoder.

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Tasks

DecoderIntent DetectionLanguage ModelingLanguage ModellingNatural Language UnderstandingSlot FillingWord Embeddingsslot-filling

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Intent Detection ATIS CTRAN Accuracy 98.07 #5 of 16 Archive leaderboard report
Intent Detection SNIPS CTRAN Accuracy 99.42 #1 of 10 Archive leaderboard report
Slot Filling ATIS CTRAN F1 0.9846 #1 of 14 Archive leaderboard report
Slot Filling SNIPS CTRAN F1 98.3 #1 of 10 Archive leaderboard report

Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.

Methods

1D CNNAbsolute Position EncodingsAdamAttentionAttention DropoutBERTBPEDense ConnectionsDropoutLabel SmoothingLayer NormalizationLinear LayerLinear Warmup With Linear DecayMulti-Head AttentionPosition-Wise Feed-Forward LayerResidual ConnectionSoftmaxTransformerWeight DecayWordPiece

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