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Using BERT Model for Intent Classification in Human-Computer Dialogue Systems to Reduce Data Volume Requirement

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Advances in Neuroergonomics and Cognitive Engineering (AHFE 2021)

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Abstract

User-intent classification is a sub-task in natural language understanding of human-computer dialogue systems. To reduce the data volume requirement of deep learning for intent classification, this paper proposes a transfer learning method for Chinese user-intent classification task, which is based on the Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) pre-trained language model. First, a simulation experiment on 31 Chinese participants was implemented to collect first-handed Chinese human-computer conversation data. Then, the data was augmented through back-translation and randomly split into the training dataset, validation dataset and test dataset. Next, the BERT model was fine-tuned into a Chinese user-intent classifier. As a result, the predicting accuracy of the BERT classifier reaches 99.95%, 98.39% and 99.89% on the training dataset, validation dataset and test dataset. The result suggests that the application of BERT transfer learning has reduced the data volume requirement for Chinese intent classification task to a satiable level.

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Acknowledgments

We would like to thank all participants in the experiment. This paper is supported by the Key Platforms and Scientific Research Projects Foundation of Guangdong Education Department (Project approval no. 2016WTSCX002).

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Correspondence to Huaming Peng .

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Liu, H., Peng, H. (2021). Using BERT Model for Intent Classification in Human-Computer Dialogue Systems to Reduce Data Volume Requirement. In: Ayaz, H., Asgher, U., Paletta, L. (eds) Advances in Neuroergonomics and Cognitive Engineering. AHFE 2021. Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems, vol 259. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-80285-1_59

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-80285-1_59

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

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