Cross-Domain Slot Filling as Machine Reading Comprehension

Cross-Domain Slot Filling as Machine Reading Comprehension

Mengshi Yu, Jian Liu, Yufeng Chen, Jinan Xu, Yujie Zhang

Proceedings of the Thirtieth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main Track. Pages 3992-3998. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2021/550

With task-oriented dialogue systems being widely applied in everyday life, slot filling, the essential component of task-oriented dialogue systems, is required to be quickly adapted to new domains that contain domain-specific slots with few or no training data. Previous methods for slot filling usually adopt sequence labeling framework, which, however, often has limited ability when dealing with the domain-specific slots. In this paper, we take a new perspective on cross-domain slot filling by framing it as a machine reading comprehension (MRC) problem. Our approach firstly transforms slot names into well-designed queries, which contain rich informative prior knowledge and are very helpful for the detection of domain-specific slots. In addition, we utilize the large-scale MRC dataset for pre-training, which further alleviates the data scarcity problem. Experimental results on SNIPS and ATIS datasets show that our approach consistently outperforms the existing state-of-the-art methods by a large margin.
Keywords:
Natural Language Processing: Dialogue
Natural Language Processing: Information Extraction