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Effectiveness of Pre-training for Few-shot Intent Classification

Sep 13, 2021
Haode Zhang, Yuwei Zhang, Li-Ming Zhan, Jiaxin Chen, Guangyuan Shi, Xiao-Ming Wu, Albert Y. S. Lam

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This paper investigates the effectiveness of pre-training for few-shot intent classification. While existing paradigms commonly further pre-train language models such as BERT on a vast amount of unlabeled corpus, we find it highly effective and efficient to simply fine-tune BERT with a small set of labeled utterances from public datasets. Specifically, fine-tuning BERT with roughly 1,000 labeled data yields a pre-trained model -- IntentBERT, which can easily surpass the performance of existing pre-trained models for few-shot intent classification on novel domains with very different semantics. The high effectiveness of IntentBERT confirms the feasibility and practicality of few-shot intent detection, and its high generalization ability across different domains suggests that intent classification tasks may share a similar underlying structure, which can be efficiently learned from a small set of labeled data. The source code can be found at

* Accepted as a short paper in Findings of EMNLP 2021 

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