A Two-stage Model for Slot Filling in Low-resource Settings: Domain-agnostic Non-slot Reduction and Pretrained Contextual Embeddings

Cennet Oguz, Ngoc Thang Vu

SustaiNLP: Workshop on Simple and Efficient Natural Language Processing Workshop Paper

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Abstract: Learning-based slot filling - a key component of spoken language understanding systems - typically requires a large amount of in-domain hand-labeled data for training. In this paper, we propose a novel two-stage model architecture that can be trained with only a few in-domain hand-labeled examples. The first step is designed to remove non-slot tokens (i.e., O labeled tokens), as they introduce noise in the input of slot filling models. This step is domain-agnostic and therefore, can be trained by exploiting out-of-domain data. The second step identifies slot names only for slot tokens by using state-of-the-art pretrained contextual embeddings such as ELMO and BERT. We show that our approach outperforms other state-of-art systems on the SNIPS benchmark dataset.
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