Towards Joint Intent Detection and Slot Filling via Higher-order Attention

Abstract

Recently, attention-based models for joint intent detection and slot filling have achieved state-of-the-art performance. However, we think the conventional attention can only capture the first-order feature interaction between two tasks and is insufficient. To address this issue, we propose a unified BiLinear attention block, which leverages bilinear pooling to synchronously explore both the contextual and channel-wise bilinear attention distributions to capture the second-order interactions between the input intent and slot features. Higher-order interactions are constructed by combining many such blocks and exploiting Exponential Linear activations. Furthermore, we present a Higher-order Attention Network (HAN) to jointly model them. The experimental results show that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art results. We also conduct experiments on the new SLURP dataset, and give a discussion on HAN’s properties, i.e., robustness and generalization.