One of the primary tasks in Natural Language Understanding (NLU) is to recognize the intents as well as domains of users' spoken and written language utterances. Most existing research formulates this as a supervised classification problem with a closed-world assumption, i.e. the domains or intents to be identified are pre-defined or known beforehand. Real-world applications however increasingly encounter dynamic, rapidly evolving environments with newly emerging intents and domains, about which no information is known during model training. We propose a novel framework, ADVIN, to automatically discover novel domains and intents from large volumes of unlabeled data. We first employ an open classification model to identify all utterances potentially consisting of a novel intent. Next, we build a knowledge transfer component with a pairwise margin loss function. It learns discriminative deep features to group together utterances and discover multiple latent intent categories within them in an unsupervised manner. We finally hierarchically link mutually related intents into domains, forming an intent-domain taxonomy. ADVIN significantly outperforms baselines on three benchmark datasets, and real user utterances from a commercial voice-powered agent.

提出了一种名为ADVIN的用于自动发现大量未标记数据中的新领域和意图的框架，其采用开放式分类模型识别所有可能包含新意图的话语，使用成对边缘损失函数的知识转移部分以无监督的方式发现多个隐含意图类别并将其层次化链接成领域并形成意图-领域分类法，这显著优于三个基准数据集和商业语音驱动代理的实际用户话语。

文本话语中的新意图和领域的自动发现