Detecting Out-of-Domain (OOD) or unknown intents from user queries is essential in a task-oriented dialog system. A key challenge of OOD detection is to learn discriminative semantic features. Traditional cross-entropy loss only focuses on whether a sample is correctly classified, and does not explicitly distinguish the margins between categories. In this paper, we propose a supervised contrastive learning objective to minimize intra-class variance by pulling together in-domain intents belonging to the same class and maximize inter-class variance by pushing apart samples from different classes. Besides, we employ an adversarial augmentation mechanism to obtain pseudo diverse views of a sample in the latent space. Experiments on two public datasets prove the effectiveness of our method capturing discriminative representations for OOD detection.

Zero-shot cross-domain slot filling alleviates the data dependence in the case of data scarcity in the target domain, which has aroused extensive research. However, as most of the existing methods do not achieve effective knowledge transfer to the target domain, they just fit the distribution of the seen slot and show poor performance on unseen slot in the target domain. To solve this, we propose a novel approach based on prototypical contrastive learning with a dynamic label confusion strategy for zero-shot slot filling. The prototypical contrastive learning aims to reconstruct the semantic constraints of labels, and we introduce the label confusion strategy to establish the label dependence between the source domains and the target domain on-the-fly. Experimental results show that our model achieves significant improvement on the unseen slots, while also set new state-of-the-arts on slot filling task.

Representation learning is widely used in NLP for a vast range of tasks. However, representations derived from text corpora often reflect social biases. This phenomenon is pervasive and consistent across different neural models, causing serious concern. Previous methods mostly rely on a pre-specified, user-provided direction or suffer from unstable training. In this paper, we propose an adversarial disentangled debiasing model to dynamically decouple social bias attributes from the intermediate representations trained on the main task. We aim to denoise bias information while training on the downstream task, rather than completely remove social bias and pursue static unbiased representations. Experiments show the effectiveness of our method, both on the effect of debiasing and the main task performance.

Detecting out-of-domain (OOD) intents is crucial for the deployed task-oriented dialogue system. Previous unsupervised OOD detection methods only extract discriminative features of different in-domain intents while supervised counterparts can directly distinguish OOD and in-domain intents but require extensive labeled OOD data. To combine the benefits of both types, we propose a self-supervised contrastive learning framework to model discriminative semantic features of both in-domain intents and OOD intents from unlabeled data. Besides, we introduce an adversarial augmentation neural module to improve the efficiency and robustness of contrastive learning. Experiments on two public benchmark datasets show that our method can consistently outperform the baselines with a statistically significant margin.

Open-vocabulary slots, such as file name, album name, or schedule title, significantly degrade the performance of neural-based slot filling models since these slots can take on values from a virtually unlimited set and have no semantic restriction nor a length limit. In this paper, we propose a robust adversarial model-agnostic slot filling method that explicitly decouples local semantics inherent in open-vocabulary slot words from the global context. We aim to depart entangled contextual semantics and focus more on the holistic context at the level of the whole sentence. Experiments on two public datasets show that our method consistently outperforms other methods with a statistically significant margin on all the open-vocabulary slots without deteriorating the performance of normal slots.

Detecting out-of-domain (OOD) input intents is critical in the task-oriented dialog system. Different from most existing methods that rely heavily on manually labeled OOD samples, we focus on the unsupervised OOD detection scenario where there are no labeled OOD samples except for labeled in-domain data. In this paper, we propose a simple but strong generative distance-based classifier to detect OOD samples. We estimate the class-conditional distribution on feature spaces of DNNs via Gaussian discriminant analysis (GDA) to avoid over-confidence problems. And we use two distance functions, Euclidean and Mahalanobis distances, to measure the confidence score of whether a test sample belongs to OOD. Experiments on four benchmark datasets show that our method can consistently outperform the baselines.

Zero-shot slot filling has widely arisen to cope with data scarcity in target domains. However, previous approaches often ignore constraints between slot value representation and related slot description representation in the latent space and lack enough model robustness. In this paper, we propose a Contrastive Zero-Shot Learning with Adversarial Attack (CZSL-Adv) method for the cross-domain slot filling. The contrastive loss aims to map slot value contextual representations to the corresponding slot description representations. And we introduce an adversarial attack training strategy to improve model robustness. Experimental results show that our model significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines under both zero-shot and few-shot settings.