LANID: LLM-assisted New Intent Discovery

Abstract

Data annotation is expensive in Task-Oriented Dialogue (TOD) systems. New Intent Discovery (NID) is a task aims to identify novel intents while retaining the ability to recognize known intents. It is essential for expanding the intent base of task-based dialogue systems. Previous works relying on external datasets are hardly extendable. Meanwhile, the effective ones are generally depends on the power of the Large Language Models (LLMs). To address the limitation of model extensibility and take advantages of LLMs for the NID task, we propose LANID, a framework that leverages LLM’s zero-shot capability to enhance the performance of a smaller text encoder on the NID task. LANID employs KNN and DBSCAN algorithms to select appropriate pairs of utterances from the training set. The LLM is then asked to determine the relationships between them. The collected data are then used to construct finetuning task and the small text encoder is optimized with a triplet loss. Our experimental results demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed method on three distinct NID datasets, surpassing all strong baselines in both unsupervised and semi-supervised settings. Our code can be found in https://github.com/floatSDSDS/LANID.