A Pointer Network-based Approach for Joint Extraction and Detection of Multi-Label Multi-Class Intents

TL;DR

This paper introduces a pointer network-based system for joint extraction and detection of multiple intents in multi-lingual, multi-label queries, addressing limitations of existing single-intent models and providing a new dataset.

Contribution

The study presents a novel multi-label multi-class intent detection dataset and a pointer network architecture for extracting intent spans and detecting multiple intents in complex queries.

Findings

Outperforms baseline methods in accuracy and F1-score

Effectively extracts multiple intent spans from complex queries

Provides a new multilingual multi-label intent dataset

Abstract

In task-oriented dialogue systems, intent detection is crucial for interpreting user queries and providing appropriate responses. Existing research primarily addresses simple queries with a single intent, lacking effective systems for handling complex queries with multiple intents and extracting different intent spans. Additionally, there is a notable absence of multilingual, multi-intent datasets. This study addresses three critical tasks: extracting multiple intent spans from queries, detecting multiple intents, and developing a multi-lingual multi-label intent dataset. We introduce a novel multi-label multi-class intent detection dataset (MLMCID-dataset) curated from existing benchmark datasets. We also propose a pointer network-based architecture (MLMCID) to extract intent spans and detect multiple intents with coarse and fine-grained labels in the form of sextuplets. Comprehensive analysis demonstrates the superiority of our pointer network-based system over baseline approaches in terms of accuracy and F1-score across various datasets.