Papers › Efficient Intent Detection with Dual Sentence Encoders

Efficient Intent Detection with Dual Sentence Encoders

10 Mar 2020WS 2020 7arXiv:2003.04807archive 2025-07-28

Iñigo Casanueva, Tadas Temčinas, Daniela Gerz, Matthew Henderson, Ivan Vulić

Building conversational systems in new domains and with added functionality requires resource-efficient models that work under low-data regimes (i.e., in few-shot setups). Motivated by these requirements, we introduce intent detection methods backed by pretrained dual sentence encoders such as USE and ConveRT. We demonstrate the usefulness and wide applicability of the proposed intent detectors, showing that: 1) they outperform intent detectors based on fine-tuning the full BERT-Large model or using BERT as a fixed black-box encoder on three diverse intent detection data sets; 2) the gains are especially pronounced in few-shot setups (i.e., with only 10 or 30 annotated examples per intent); 3) our intent detectors can be trained in a matter of minutes on a single CPU; and 4) they are stable across different hyperparameter settings. In hope of facilitating and democratizing research focused on intention detection, we release our code, as well as a new challenging single-domain intent detection dataset comprising 13,083 annotated examples over 77 intents.

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PolyAI-LDN/task-specific-datasets mentioned on GitHubCC-BY-4.0 report
amazon-science/intent-aware-encoder mentioned on GitHubpytorchApache-2.0 report
thuiar/textoir mentioned on GitHubpytorchMIT report
thuiar/textoir-demo mentioned on GitHubpytorchGPL-3.0 report

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bleu_score amazon-science/intent-aware-encoder/downstream/protaugment/paraphrase/modeling.py community (archive-listed) unverified Apache-2.0 (permissive) · 26105291c088d807 · report
filter_generated_texts_with_clustering amazon-science/intent-aware-encoder/downstream/protaugment/paraphrase/modeling.py community (archive-listed) unverified Apache-2.0 (permissive) · bcbfb5a90e8cfb8f · report
filter_generated_texts_with_distance_metric amazon-science/intent-aware-encoder/downstream/protaugment/paraphrase/modeling.py community (archive-listed) unverified Apache-2.0 (permissive) · fa1b69cf4b2462a4 · report
load_data amazon-science/intent-aware-encoder/pretraining/run_eval.py community (archive-listed) unverified Apache-2.0 (permissive) · 47a1eabe7ee96b10 · report
load_label_file amazon-science/intent-aware-encoder/downstream/run_protonet.py community (archive-listed) unverified Apache-2.0 (permissive) · 0da58da66b680326 · report
str2bool amazon-science/intent-aware-encoder/downstream/run_eval.py community (archive-listed) unverified Apache-2.0 (permissive) · 470f909844d66c82 · report

Tasks

Intent DetectionSentence

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BANKING77

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Methods

AdamAttentionAttention DropoutBERTDense ConnectionsDropoutLayer NormalizationLinear LayerLinear Warmup With Linear DecayMulti-Head AttentionResidual ConnectionSoftmaxUSEWeight DecayWordPiece

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