# Out-of-Scope Domain and Intent Classification through Hierarchical Joint Modeling

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.14781 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14781/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 21 of its 38 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 Apr 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [Layer Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.06450/) (2016)
- [A Baseline for Detecting Misclassified and Out-of-Distribution Examples in Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02136/) (2016)
- [An Evaluation Dataset for Intent Classification and Out-of-Scope Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.02027/) (2019)
- [Snips Voice Platform: an embedded Spoken Language Understanding system for private-by-design voice interfaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.10190/) (2018)
- [BERT for Joint Intent Classification and Slot Filling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.10909/) (2019)
- [TOD-BERT: Pre-trained Natural Language Understanding for Task-Oriented Dialogue](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.06871/) (2020)
- [Benchmarking Natural Language Understanding Services for building Conversational Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.05566/) (2019)
- [Asking Clarifying Questions in Open-Domain Information-Seeking Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.06554/) (2019)
- [Attention-Based Recurrent Neural Network Models for Joint Intent Detection and Slot Filling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.01454/) (2016)
- [Joint Slot Filling and Intent Detection via Capsule Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.09471/) (2018)
- [Deep Unknown Intent Detection with Margin Loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.00434/) (2019)
- [A Joint Many-Task Model: Growing a Neural Network for Multiple NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.01587/) (2016)
- [A Hierarchical Multi-task Approach for Learning Embeddings from Semantic Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.06031/) (2018)
- [A Bi-model based RNN Semantic Frame Parsing Model for Intent Detection and Slot Filling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.10235/) (2018)
- [Joint Learning of Domain Classification and Out-of-Domain Detection with Dynamic Class Weighting for Satisficing False Acceptance Rates](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.00072/) (2018)
- [OneNet: Joint Domain, Intent, Slot Prediction for Spoken Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.05149/) (2018)
- [A Post-processing Method for Detecting Unknown Intent of Dialogue System via Pre-trained Deep Neural Network Classifier](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.03504/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Domain Adaptation in Intent Classification Systems: A Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.14415/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

User queries for a real-world dialog system may sometimes fall outside the scope of the system's capabilities, but appropriate system responses will enable smooth processing throughout the human-computer interaction. This paper is concerned with the user's intent, and focuses on out-of-scope intent classification in dialog systems. Although user intents are highly correlated with the application domain, few studies have exploited such correlations for intent classification. Rather than developing a two-stage approach that first classifies the domain and then the intent, we propose a hierarchical multi-task learning approach based on a joint model to classify domain and intent simultaneously. Novelties in the proposed approach include: (1) sharing supervised out-of-scope signals in joint modeling of domain and intent classification to replace a two-stage pipeline; and (2) introducing a hierarchical model that learns the intent and domain representations in the higher and lower layers respectively. Experiments show that the model outperforms existing methods in terms of accuracy, out-of-scope recall and F1. Additionally, threshold-based post-processing further improves performance by balancing precision and recall in intent classification.