Exploring the Use of Natural Language Descriptions of Intents for Large Language Models in Zero-shot Intent Classification

Taesuk Hong, Youbin Ahn, Dongkyu Lee, Joongbo Shin, Seungpil Won, Janghoon Han, Stanley Jungkyu Choi, Jungyun Seo

Abstract: In task-oriented dialogue systems, intent classification is crucial for accurately understanding user queries and providing appropriate services. This study explores the use of intent descriptions with large language models for unseen domain intent classification. By examining the effects of description quality, quantity, and input length management, we identify practical guidelines for optimizing performance. Our experiments using FLAN-T5 3B demonstrate that 1) high-quality descriptions for both training and testing significantly improve accuracy, 2) diversity in training descriptions doesn’t greatly affect performance, and 3) off-the-shelf rankers selecting around ten intent options reduce input length without compromising performance. We emphasize that high-quality testing descriptions have a greater impact on accuracy than training descriptions. These findings provide practical guidelines for using intent descriptions with large language models to achieve effective and efficient intent classification in low-resource settings.

External IDs:dblp:conf/sigdial/HongALSWHCS24