New Intent Discovery with Attracting and Dispersing Prototype

Shun Zhang, Jian Yang, Jiaqi Bai, Chaoran Yan, Tongliang Li, Zhao Yan, Zhoujun Li


Abstract
New Intent Discovery (NID) aims to recognize known and infer new intent categories with the help of limited labeled and large-scale unlabeled data. The task is addressed as a feature-clustering problem and recent studies augment instance representation. However, existing methods fail to capture cluster-friendly representations, since they show less capability to effectively control and coordinate within-cluster and between-cluster distances. Tailored to the NID problem, we propose a Robust and Adaptive Prototypical learning (RAP) framework for globally distinct decision boundaries for both known and new intent categories. Specifically, a robust prototypical attracting learning (RPAL) method is designed to compel instances to gravitate toward their corresponding prototype, achieving greater within-cluster compactness. To attain larger between-cluster separation, another adaptive prototypical dispersing learning (APDL) method is devised to maximize the between-cluster distance from the prototype-to-prototype perspective. Experimental results evaluated on three challenging benchmarks (CLINC, BANKING, and StackOverflow) of our method with better cluster-friendly representation demonstrate that RAP brings in substantial improvements over the current state-of-the-art methods (even large language model) by a large margin (average 5.5% improvement).
Anthology ID:
2024.lrec-main.1067
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)
Month:
May
Year:
2024
Address:
Torino, Italia
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Min-Yen Kan, Veronique Hoste, Alessandro Lenci, Sakriani Sakti, Nianwen Xue
Venues:
LREC | COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA and ICCL
Note:
Pages:
12193–12206
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.1067
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Shun Zhang, Jian Yang, Jiaqi Bai, Chaoran Yan, Tongliang Li, Zhao Yan, and Zhoujun Li. 2024. New Intent Discovery with Attracting and Dispersing Prototype. In Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), pages 12193–12206, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
Cite (Informal):
New Intent Discovery with Attracting and Dispersing Prototype (Zhang et al., LREC-COLING 2024)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.1067.pdf