IntentBERT: Effectiveness of Pre-training for Few-shot Intent Classification

This repository contains the code and pre-trained models for our paper on EMNLP-findings: Effectiveness of Pre-training for Few-shot Intent Classification. We write this readme thanks to this repo.

Quick Links

• Overview
• Train IntentBERT
  • Requirements
  • Evaluation
  • Dataset
  • Before running
  • Training
• Bugs or Questions?
• Citation

Overview

• Is it possible to learn transferable task-specific knowledge to generalize across different domains for intent detection?

In this paper, we offer a free lunch solution for few-shot intent detection by pre-training on a large publicly available dataset. Our experiment shows significant improvement over previous pre-trained models on a drastically different target domain, which indicates IntentBERT possesses high generalizability and is a ready-to-use model without further fine-tuning. We also propose a joint pre-training scheme (IntentBERT+MLM) to leverage unlabeled data on target domain.

Train IntentBERT

In the following section, we describe how to train a IntentBERT model by using our code.

Requirements

Run the following script to install the dependencies,

pip install -r requirements.txt

Dataset

We provide dataset required for training and evaluation in data folder of this repo. Specifically, "oos" & "hwu64" are used for training or validation, "bank77", "mcid" & "hint3" are used as target dataset. In each dataset, there is a showDataset.py. You can cd into the dataset folder and run it to display the statistics and examples of the dataset.

python showDataset.py

Before running

Set up the path for data and models in ./utils/commonVar.py as you wish. For example,

SAVE_PATH = './saved_models'
DATA_PATH = './data'

Download the pre-trained IntentBERT model here, and save under SAVE_PATH. The scripts for running experiments are kept in ./scripts. You can run a script with an argument debug for debug mode and normal for experiment mode. A log file will save all the outputs into a file under ./log.

Evaluation

Code for few-shot evaluation is kept in eval.py with a corresponding bash script in ./scripts.

Run with the default parameters as,

./scripts/eval.sh normal ${cuda_id}

Necessary arguments for the evaluation script are as follows,

• --dataDir: Directory for evaluation data
• --targetDomain: Target domain name for evaluation
• --shot: Shot number for each class
• --LMName: Language model name to be evaluated. Could be a language model name in huggingface hub or a directory in SAVE_PATH

Change LMName to evaluate our provided pre-trained models. We provide four trained models under ./saved_models:

1. intent-bert-base-uncased
2. joint-intent-bert-base-uncased-hint3
3. joint-intent-bert-base-uncased-bank77
4. joint-intent-bert-base-uncased-mcid

They are corresponding to 'IntentBERT (OOS)', 'IntentBERT (OOS)+MLM'(on hint3), 'IntentBERT (OOS)+MLM'(on bank77) and 'IntentBERT (OOS)+MLM'(on mcid) in the paper.

Training

Both supervised pre-training and joint pre-training can be run by transfer.py with a corresponding script in ./scripts. Important arguments are shown here,

• --dataDir: Directory for training, validation and test data, concat with ","
• --sourceDomain: Source domain name for training, concat with ","
• --valDomain: Validation domain name, concat with ","
• --targetDomain: Target domain name for evaluation, concat with ","
• --shot: Shot number for each class
• --tensorboard: Enable tensorboard
• --saveModel: Enable to save model
• --saveName: The name you want to specify for the saved model, or "none" to use the default name
• --validation: Enable validation, it is turned off automatically while using joint pre-training
• --mlm: Enable mlm, enable this while using joint pre-training
• --LMName: Languge model name as an initialization. Could be a language model name in huggingface hub or a directory in SAVE_PATH

Note that the results might be different from the reported by 1~3% when training with different seeds.

Supervised Pre-training

Turn off mlm and turn on validation. Change the datasets and domain names for different settings.

Joint Pre-training

Turn on mlm, validation will be turned off automatically. Change the datasets and domain names for different settings.

Bugs or questions?

If you have any questions related to the code or the paper, feel free to email Haode (haode.zhang@connect.poly.hk) and Yuwei (zhangyuwei.work@gmail.com). If you encounter any problems when using the code, or want to report a bug, you can open an issue. Please try to specify the problem with details so we can help you better and quicker!

Citation

Please cite our paper if you use IntentBERT in your work:

@article{zhang2021effectiveness,
   title={Effectiveness of Pre-training for Few-shot Intent Classification},
   author={Haode Zhang and Yuwei Zhang and Li-Ming Zhan and Jiaxin Chen and Guangyuan Shi and Xiao-Ming Wu and Albert Y. S. Lam},
   journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2109.05782},
   year={2021}
}