From General to Specific: Leveraging Named Entity Recognition for Slot Filling in Conversational Language Understanding
Samuel Louvan, Bernardo Magnini · Accademia University Press eBooks · 2018
Slot filling techniques are often adopted in language understanding components for task-oriented dialogue systems. In recent approaches, neural models for slot filling are trained on domain-specific datasets, making it difficult porting to similar domains when few or no training data are available. In this paper we use multi-task learning to leverage general knowledge of a task, namely Named Entity Recognition (NER), to improve slot filling performance on a semantically similar domain-specific task. Our experiments show that, for some datasets, transfer learning from NER can achieve competitive performance compared with the state-of-the-art and can also help slot filling in low resource scenarios.