Most dialogue systems in real world rely on predefined intents and answers for QA service, so discovering potential intents from large corpus previously is really important for building such dialogue services. Considering that most scenarios have few intents known already and most intents waiting to be discovered, we focus on semi-supervised text clustering and try to make the proposed method benefit from labeled samples for better overall clustering performance. In this paper, we propose Deep Contrastive Semi-supervised Clustering (DCSC), which aims to cluster text samples in a semi-supervised way and provide grouped intents to operation staff. To make DCSC fully utilize the limited known intents, we propose a two-stage training procedure for DCSC, in which DCSC will be trained on both labeled samples and unlabeled samples, and achieve better text representation and clustering performance. We conduct experiments on two public datasets to compare our model with several popular methods, and the results show DCSC achieve best performance across all datasets and circumstances, indicating the effect of the improvements in our work.
Discovering new intents is of great significance to establishing Bootstrapped Task-Oriented Dialogue System. Most existing methods either lack the ability to transfer prior knowledge in the known intent data or fall into the dilemma of forgetting prior knowledge in the follow-up. More importantly, these methods do not deeply explore the intrinsic structure of unlabeled data, so they can not seek out the characteristics that make an intent in general. In this paper, starting from the intuition that discovering intents could be beneficial to the identification of the known intents, we propose a …
University of Illinois at Chicago（伊利诺伊大学芝加哥分校）；Adobe Research（Adobe 研究院）
In this work, we focus on a more challenging few-shot intent detection scenario where many intents are fine-grained and semantically similar. We present a simple yet effective few-shot intent detection schema via contrastive pre-training and fine-tuning. Specifically, we first conduct self-supervised contrastive pre-training on collected intent datasets, which implicitly learns to discriminate semantically similar utterances without using any labels. We then perform few-shot intent detection together with supervised contrastive learning, which explicitly pulls utterances from the same intent c…
Identifying new user intents is an essential task in the dialogue system. However, it is hard to get satisfying clustering results since the definition of intents is strongly guided by prior knowledge. Existing methods incorporate prior knowledge by intensive feature engineering, which not only leads to overfitting but also makes it sensitive to the number of clusters. In this paper, we propose constrained deep adaptive clustering with cluster refinement (CDAC+), an end-to-end clustering method that can naturally incorporate pairwise constraints as prior knowledge to guide the clustering proce…
Tianjin University（天津大学）；China Mobile Communication Group Tianjin Co., Ltd.（中国移动通信集团天津有限公司）
Task-oriented dialog(TOD) aims to assist users in achieving specific goals through multi-turn conversation. Recently, good results have been obtained based on large pre-trained models. However, the labeled-data scarcity hinders the efficient development of TOD systems at scale. In this work, we constructed a weakly supervised dataset based on a teacher/student paradigm that leverages a large collection of unlabelled dialogues. Furthermore, we built a modular dialogue system and integrated coarse-to-fine grained classification for user intent detection. Experiments show that our method can reac…
Dalian University of Technology（大连理工大学）；Peking University（北京大学）
Intent classification (IC) and slot filling (SF) are critical building blocks in task-oriented dialogue systems. These two tasks are closely-related and can flourish each other. Since only a few utterances can be utilized for identifying fast-emerging new intents and slots, data scarcity issue often occurs when implementing IC and SF. However, few IC/SF models perform well when the number of training samples per class is quite small. In this paper, we propose a novel explicit-joint and supervised-contrastive learning framework for few-shot intent classification and slot filling. Its highlights…
Salesforce Research（Salesforce研究中心）；UC San Diego（加州大学圣地亚哥分校）
Users' interactions with items are driven by various intents (e.g., preparing for holiday gifts, shopping for fishing equipment, etc.).However, users' underlying intents are often unobserved/latent, making it challenging to leverage such latent intents forSequentialrecommendation(SR). To investigate the benefits of latent intents and leverage them effectively for recommendation, we proposeIntentContrastiveLearning(ICL), a general learning paradigm that leverages a latent intent variable into SR. The core idea is to learn users' intent distribution functions from unlabeled user behavior sequenc…
Chongqing University（重庆大学）；iFLYTEK Research（讯飞研究院）；University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；State Key Laboratory of Cognitive Intelligence（认知智能国家重点实验室）
Intent recognition is critical for task-oriented dialogue systems. However, for emerging domains and new services, it is difficult to accurately identify the key intent of a conversation due to time-consuming data annotation and comparatively poor model transferability. Therefore, the automatic induction of dialogue intention is very important for intelligent dialogue systems. This paper presents our solution to Track 2 of Intent Induction from Conversations for Task-Oriented Dialogue at the Eleventh Dialogue System Technology Challenge (DSTC11). The essence of intention clustering lies in dis…
One Stone, Four Birds: A Comprehensive Solution for QA System Using Supervised Contrastive Learning
Graduate School of Information Science and Electrical Engineering, Kyushu University（九州大学信息科学与电气工程研究院）；Faculty of Information Science and Electrical Engineering, Kyushu University（九州大学信息科学与电气工程学部）
Pseudo-Label Enhanced Prototypical Contrastive Learning for Uniformed Intent Discovery
School of Software Engineering, Xi’an Jiaotong University（西安交通大学软件学院）；City University of Hong Kong（香港城市大学）；Singapore Management University（新加坡管理大学）；School of Information and Communication Engineering, Xi’an Jiaotong University（西安交通大学信息与通信工程学院）
Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications（北京邮电大学）；Meituan（美团）
Discovering out-of-domain (OOD) intent is important for developing new skills in task-oriented dialogue systems. The key challenges lie in how to transfer prior in-domain (IND) knowledge to OOD clustering, as well as jointly learn OOD representations and cluster assignments. Previous methods suffer from in-domain overfitting problem, and there is a natural gap between representation learning and clustering objectives. In this paper, we propose a unified K-nearest neighbor contrastive learning framework to discover OOD intents. Specifically, for IND pre-training stage, we propose a KCL objectiv…
Contrastive Learning Method for Sequential Recommendation based on Multi-Intention Disentanglement
College of Computer, Qinghai Normal University（青海师范大学计算机学院）；The State Key Laboratory of Tibetan Intelligent Information Processing and Application（藏语智能信息处理及应用国家重点实验室）；Tibetan Information Processing and Machine Translation Key Laboratory of Qinghai Province（青海省藏文信息处理与机器翻译重点实验室）；Key Laboratory of Tibetan Information Processing, Ministry of Education（藏文信息处理教育部重点实验室）
Knowledge-Aware Multi-Intent Contrastive Learning for Multi-Behavior Recommendation
School of Information Science and Engineering, Yanshan University（燕山大学信息科学与工程学院）；School of Information Science and Engineering, Xinjiang College Of Science & Technology（新疆科学技术学院信息科学与工程学院）
Enhancing Contrastive Learning for Geolocalization by Discovering Hard Negatives on Semivariograms
Professorship Big Geospatial Data Management, Technical University of Munich Germany（技术大学慕尼黑大数据地理空间管理教授职位）；University of Maine United States（缅因大学）；University of the Bundeswehr Munich Germany（联邦国防军大学慕尼黑）
Co-guiding for Multi-intent Spoken Language Understanding
Australian Artificial Intelligence Institute (AAII), University of Technology Sydney（悉尼科技大学澳大利亚人工智能研究所（AAII））；CFAR, Agency for Science, Technology and Research（新加坡科技研究局（A*STAR）CFAR）；IHPC, Agency for Science, Technology and Research（新加坡科技研究局（A*STAR）IHPC）；School of Computer Science and Engineering, Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学计算机科学与工程学院）
Token-Level Contrastive Learning with Modality-Aware Prompting for Multimodal Intent Recognition
Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Beijing National Research Center for Information Science and Technology（北京信息科学与技术国家研究中心）；Hebei University of Science and Technology（河北科技大学）
Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications（北京邮电大学）；Meituan Group（美团集团）
Detecting Out-of-Domain (OOD) or unknown intents from user queries is essential in a task-oriented dialog system. A key challenge of OOD detection is to learn discriminative semantic features. Traditional cross-entropy loss only focuses on whether a sample is correctly classified, and does not explicitly distinguish the margins between categories. In this paper, we propose a supervised contrastive learning objective to minimize intra-class variance by pulling together in-domain intents belonging to the same class and maximize inter-class variance by pushing apart samples from different classes…
Xi’an Jiaotong University（西安交通大学）；University of Massachusetts Boston（马萨诸塞大学波士顿分校）；Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；Lenovo Research（联想研究院）
Novel category discovery aims at adapting models trained on known categories to novel categories. Previous works only focus on the scenario where known and novel categories are of the same granularity. In this paper, we investigate a new practical scenario called Fine-grained Category Discovery under Coarse-grained supervision (FCDC). FCDC aims at discovering fine-grained categories with only coarse-grained labeled data, which can adapt models to categories of different granularity from known ones and reduce significant labeling cost. It is also a challenging task since supervised training on …
Unsupervised clustering aims at discovering the semantic categories of data according to some distance measured in the representation space. However, different categories often overlap with each other in the representation space at the beginning of the learning process, which poses a significant challenge for distance-based clustering in achieving good separation between different categories. To this end, we propose Supporting Clustering with Contrastive Learning (SCCL) -- a novel framework to leverage contrastive learning to promote better separation. We assess the performance of SCCL on shor…
HKUST（香港科技大学）；Xi’an Jiaotong University（西安交通大学）；Microsoft Research Asia（微软亚洲研究院）；EIT（欧洲创新与技术学院）
From the intuitive notion of disentanglement, the image variations corresponding to different factors should be distinct from each other, and the disentangled representation should reflect those variations with separate dimensions. To discover the factors and learn disentangled representation, previous methods typically leverage an extra regularization term when learning to generate realistic images. However, the term usually results in a trade-off between disentanglement and generation quality. For the generative models pretrained without any disentanglement term, the generated images show se…
Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications（北京邮电大学）；Meituan Group（美团集团）；China Mobile Research Institute（中国移动研究院）
Traditional intent classification models are based on a pre-defined intent set and only recognize limited in-domain (IND) intent classes. But users may input out-of-domain (OOD) queries in a practical dialogue system. Such OOD queries can provide directions for future improvement. In this paper, we define a new task, Generalized Intent Discovery (GID), which aims to extend an IND intent classifier to an open-world intent set including IND and OOD intents. We hope to simultaneously classify a set of labeled IND intent classes while discovering and recognizing new unlabeled OOD types incremental…
McGill University（麦吉尔大学）；MILA - Quebec AI Institute（MILA——魁北克人工智能研究所）；City University of Hong Kong（香港城市大学）
To offer accurate and diverse recommendation services, recent methods use auxiliary information to foster the learning process of user and item representations. Many SOTA methods fuse different sources of information (user, item, knowledge graph, tags, etc.) into a graph and use Graph Neural Networks to introduce the auxiliary information through the message passing paradigm. In this work, we seek an alternative framework that is light and effective through self-supervised learning across different sources of information, particularly for the commonly accessible item tag information. We use a …
Southern University of Science and Technology（南方科技大学）；University of Surrey（萨里大学）；MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab（MIT-IBM沃森人工智能实验室）
Punctuation is critical in understanding natural language text. Currently, most automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems do not generate punctuation, which affects the performance of downstream tasks, such as intent detection and slot filling. This gives rise to the need for punctuation restoration. Recent work in punctuation restoration heavily utilizes pre-trained language models without considering data imbalance when predicting punctuation classes. In this work, we address this problem by proposing a token-level supervised contrastive learning method that aims at maximizing the distance …
Context modeling plays a significant role in building multi-turn dialogue systems. In order to make full use of context information, systems can use Incomplete Utterance Rewriting(IUR) methods to simplify the multi-turn dialogue into single-turn by merging current utterance and context information into a self-contained utterance. However, previous approaches ignore the intent consistency between the original query and rewritten query. The detection of omitted or coreferred locations in the original query can be further improved. In this paper, we introduce contrastive learning and multi-task l…
User intent understanding is a crucial step in designing both conversational agents and search engines. Detecting or inferring user intent is challenging, since the user utterances or queries can be short, ambiguous, and contextually dependent. To address these research challenges, my thesis work focuses on: 1) Utterance topic and intent classification for conversational agents 2) Query intent mining and classification for Web search engines, focusing on the e-commerce domain. To address the first topic, I proposed novel models to incorporate entity information and conversation-context clues t…
HC$^2$L: Hybrid and Cooperative Contrastive Learning for Cross-lingual Spoken Language Understanding
University of Science and Technology Beijing（北京科技大学）；Agency for Science, Technology and Research（新加坡科技研究局）；Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；University of Technology Sydney（悉尼科技大学）
The aim of this paper is to demonstrate the efficacy of using Contrastive Random Walk as a curiosity method to achieve faster convergence to the optimal policy.Contrastive Random Walk defines the transition matrix of a random walk with the help of neural networks. It learns a meaningful state representation with a closed loop. The loss of Contrastive Random Walk serves as an intrinsic reward and is added to the environment reward. Our method works well in non-tabular sparse reward scenarios, in the sense that our method receives the highest reward within the same iterations compared to other m…
Contrastive Training of Complex-Valued Autoencoders for Object Discovery
The Swiss AI Lab, IDSIA, USI & SUPSI（瑞士AI实验室，IDSIA，USI与SUPSI）；Center for Brain Science, Harvard University（哈佛大学脑科学中心）；AI Initiative, KAUST（阿卜杜拉国王科技大学AI计划）
This paper proposes a novel cell-based neural architecture search algorithm (NAS), which completely alleviates the expensive costs of data labeling inherited from supervised learning. Our algorithm capitalizes on the effectiveness of self-supervised learning for image representations, which is an increasingly crucial topic of computer vision. First, using only a small amount of unlabeled train data under contrastive self-supervised learning allow us to search on a more extensive search space, discovering better neural architectures without surging the computational resources. Second, we entire…
College of Computer Science and Technology, Zhejiang University（浙江大学计算机科学与技术学院）；Alibaba Group（阿里巴巴集团）
Cross-domain recommendation has attracted increasing attention from industry and academia recently. However, most existing methods do not exploit the interest invariance between domains, which would yield sub-optimal solutions. In this paper, we propose a cross-domain recommendation method: Self-supervised Interest Transfer Network (SITN), which can effectively transfer invariant knowledge between domains via prototypical contrastive learning. Specifically, we perform two levels of cross-domain contrastive learning: 1) instance-to-instance contrastive learning, 2) instance-to-cluster contrasti…
Autodesk AI Lab（欧特克人工智能实验室）；Autodesk Research（欧特克研究院）
User modeling is crucial to understanding user behavior and essential for improving user experience and personalized recommendations. When users interact with software, vast amounts of command sequences are generated through logging and analytics systems. These command sequences contain clues to the users' goals and intents. However, these data modalities are highly unstructured and unlabeled, making it difficult for standard predictive systems to learn from. We propose SimCURL, a simple yet effective contrastive self-supervised deep learning framework that learns user representation from unla…
University of Illinois at Chicago（伊利诺伊大学芝加哥分校）；Walmart Labs（沃尔玛实验室）
The problem of basket recommendation~(BR) is to recommend a ranking list of items to the current basket. Existing methods solve this problem by assuming the items within the same basket are correlated by one semantic relation, thus optimizing the item embeddings. However, this assumption breaks when there exist multiple intents within a basket. For example, assuming a basket contains \{\textit{bread, cereal, yogurt, soap, detergent}\} where \{\textit{bread, cereal, yogurt}\} are correlated through the "breakfast" intent, while \{\textit{soap, detergent}\} are of "cleaning" intent, ignoring mul…
