MISCA: A Joint Model for Multiple Intent Detection and Slot Filling with Intent-Slot Co-Attention

Abstract

The research study of detecting multiple intents and filling slots is becoming more popular because of its relevance to complicated real-world situations. Recent advanced approaches, which are joint models based on graphs, might still face two potential issues: (i) the uncertainty introduced by constructing graphs based on preliminary intents and slots, which may transfer intent-slot correlation information to incorrect label node destinations, and (ii) direct incorporation of multiple intent labels for each token w.r.t. token-level intent voting might potentially lead to incorrect slot predictions, thereby hurting the overall performance. To address these two issues, we propose a joint model named MISCA. Our MISCA introduces an intent-slot co-attention mechanism and an underlying layer of label attention mechanism. These mechanisms enable MISCA to effectively capture correlations between intents and slot labels, eliminating the need for graph construction. They also facilitate the transfer of correlation information in both directions: from intents to slots and from slots to intents, through multiple levels of label-specific representations, without relying on token-level intent information. Experimental results show that MISCA outperforms previous models, achieving new state-of-the-art overall accuracy performances on two benchmark datasets MixATIS and MixSNIPS. This highlights the effectiveness of our attention mechanisms.