In plain words: A new dataset of chat queries includes some that fit none of a system's supported intents, spread across 150 intents and 10 domains, so models must learn to reject them. Tested classifiers sorted normal queries well but rarely spotted the out-of-scope ones.
Abstract
Task-oriented dialog systems need to know when a query falls outside their range of supported intents, but current text classification corpora only define label sets that cover every example. We introduce a new dataset that includes queries that are out-of-scope---i.e., queries that do not fall into any of the system's supported intents. This poses a new challenge because models cannot assume that every query at inference time belongs to a system-supported intent class. Our dataset also covers 150 intent classes over 10 domains, capturing the breadth that a production task-oriented agent must handle. We evaluate a range of benchmark classifiers on our dataset along with several different out-of-scope identification schemes. We find that while the classifiers perform well on in-scope intent classification, they struggle to identify out-of-scope queries. Our dataset and evaluation fill an important gap in the field, offering a way of more rigorously and realistically benchmarking text classification in task-driven dialog systems.
Stefan Larson, Anish Mahendran, Joseph J. Peper, Christopher Clarke, Andrew Lee, Parker Hill, Jonathan K. Kummerfeld, Kevin Leach, Michael A. Laurenzano, Lingjia Tang, Jason Mars
arXiv:1909.02027 · cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.LG · submitted Sep 4, 2019
abstract · pdf · html · Accepted to EMNLP-IJCNLP 2019