A Closer Look at Few-Shot Out-of-Distribution Intent Detection

AbstractWe consider few-shot out-of-distribution (OOD) intent detection, a practical and important problem for the development of task-oriented dialogue systems. Despite its importance, this problem is seldom studied in the literature, let alone examined in a systematic way. In this work, we take a closer look at this problem and identify key issues for research. In our pilot study, we reveal the reason why existing OOD intent detection methods are not adequate in dealing with this problem. Based on the observation, we propose a promising approach to tackle this problem based on latent representation generation and self-supervision. Comprehensive experiments on three real-world intent detection benchmark datasets demonstrate the high effectiveness of our proposed approach and its great potential in improving state-of-the-art methods for few-shot OOD intent detection.