A novel model based on a transformer for intent detection and slot filling

Abstract

Building task-oriented dialogue systems has become a topic of interest in the research community and industry. The task-oriented dialogue system is a closed-domain dialogue system that can perform specific tasks for users. The natural language understanding module of a task-oriented dialogue system is crucial because it is related to a task-oriented dialogue system that provides correctional services for users. The natural language understanding module of a task-oriented dialogue system performs two tasks: intent detection and slot filling. The intent detection task can be regarded as a text classification task; a classification model is trained to predict the intention of the user from the user’s input information. The slot filling task can be regarded as a sequence analysis task; a sequence analysis model is trained to predict the details of the user’s intention. In this paper, we proposed a novel model based on a transformer encoder for intent detection and slot filling. It follows the encoder-decoder structure, including a vanilla Transformer encoder, a bidirectional LSTM encoder, a linear classification decoder for intent detection, and a conditional random field decoder for slot filling. The experimental results on two public datasets show that our proposed model outperforms the existing methods based on the Transformer and can be combined with BERT to achieve better intent detection and slot filling results.