Diversity Features Enhanced Prototypical Network for Few-Shot Intent Detection

Abstract

Few-shot Intent Detection (FSID) is a challenging task in dialogue systems due to the scarcity of available annotated utterances. Although existing few-shot learning approaches have made remarkable progress, they fall short in adapting to the Generalized Few-shot Intent Detection (GFSID) task where both seen and unseen classes are present. A core problem of the simultaneous existence of these two tasks is that limited training samples fail to cover the diversity of user expressions. In this paper, we propose an effective Diversity Features Enhanced Prototypical Network (DFEPN) to enhance diversity features for novel intents by fully exploiting the diversity of known intent samples. Specially, DFEPN generates diversity features of samples in the hidden space via a diversity feature generator module and then fuses these features with original support vectors to get a more suitable prototype vector of each class. To evaluate the effectiveness of our model on both FSID and GFSID tasks, we carry out sufficient experiments on two benchmark intent detection datasets. Results demonstrate that our proposed model outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods and keeps stable performance on both two tasks.