SaLa: Scenario-aware Label Graph Interaction for Multi-intent Spoken Language Understanding

Zhihong Zhu, Xuxin Cheng, Zhanpeng Chen, Zhichang Wang, Zhiqi Huang, Yuexian Zou

Abstract: Recent joint models for multi-intent detection and slot filling (a.k.a multi-intent SLU) have obtained promising results by leveraging the semantic similarities or co-occurrence relationships between intent and slot labels. However, a critical aspect frequently neglected by current models is the significant correlations between label co-occurrences and specific scenarios, such as watching a movie or booking a ticket, which is essential for understanding user utterances in multi-intent SLU. In this paper, we propose a new framework dubbed SALA (short for Scenario-aware Label graph interaction), which effectively captures the dynamic co-occurrence relationships among labels across various scenarios, employing a strategy akin to a divide-and-conquer approach. Concretely, SALA first autonomously classifies the scenario of utterances, and tracks the co-occurring labels by maintaining a unique co-occurrence matrix for each scenario during the training phase. These scenario-independent co-occurrence matrices are further employed to guide the interactions among label representations through graph propagation to conduct accurate prediction. Extensive experiments on two multi-intent SLU benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of our SALA. More strikingly, SALA also attains competitive results on four extra single-intent and multi-domain SLU benchmark datasets, demonstrating its strong generalizability.