# Learning to Bridge Metric Spaces: Few-shot Joint Learning of Intent Detection and Slot Filling

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.07343 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.07343/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 34 of its 50 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 May 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 34)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning for Fast Adaptation of Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.03400/) (2017)
- [Neural Machine Translation by Jointly Learning to Align and Translate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0473/) (2014)
- [Prototypical Networks for Few-shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.05175/) (2017)
- [Matching Networks for One Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.04080/) (2016)
- [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)
- [A Stack-Propagation Framework with Token-Level Intent Detection for Spoken Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.02188/) (2019)
- [FewRel 2.0: Towards More Challenging Few-Shot Relation Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.07124/) (2019)
- [TapNet: Neural Network Augmented with Task-Adaptive Projection for Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.06549/) (2019)
- [A Novel Bi-directional Interrelated Model for Joint Intent Detection and Slot Filling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.00390/) (2019)
- [Few-shot Slot Tagging with Collapsed Dependency Transfer and Label-enhanced Task-adaptive Projection Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.05702/) (2020)
- [Reporting Score Distributions Makes a Difference: Performance Study of LSTM-networks for Sequence Tagging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.09861/) (2017)
- [Joint Slot Filling and Intent Detection via Capsule Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.09471/) (2018)
- [Sequence-to-Sequence Data Augmentation for Dialogue Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.01554/) (2018)
- [Induction Networks for Few-Shot Text Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.10482/) (2019)
- [Diverse Few-Shot Text Classification with Multiple Metrics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.07513/) (2018)
- [Few-shot Text Classification with Distributional Signatures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.06039/) (2019)
- [Zero-shot User Intent Detection via Capsule Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.00385/) (2018)
- [A Bi-model based RNN Semantic Frame Parsing Model for Intent Detection and Slot Filling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.10235/) (2018)
- [SlotRefine: A Fast Non-Autoregressive Model for Joint Intent Detection and Slot Filling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02693/) (2020)
- [Robust Zero-Shot Cross-Domain Slot Filling with Example Values](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.06870/) (2019)
- [Coach: A Coarse-to-Fine Approach for Cross-domain Slot Filling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.11727/) (2020)
- [CM-Net: A Novel Collaborative Memory Network for Spoken Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.06937/) (2019)
- [Multi-Level Matching and Aggregation Network for Few-Shot Relation Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.06678/) (2019)
- [Learning to Classify Intents and Slot Labels Given a Handful of Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.10793/) (2020)
- [Adapting Meta Knowledge Graph Information for Multi-Hop Reasoning over Few-Shot Relations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.11513/) (2019)
- [Multi-task learning for natural language processing in the 2020s: where are we going?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.16008/) (2020)
- [Neural Snowball for Few-Shot Relation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.11007/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [Inverse is Better! Fast and Accurate Prompt for Few-shot Slot Tagging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.00885/) (2022)
- [ILLUMINER: Instruction-tuned Large Language Models as Few-shot Intent Classifier and Slot Filler](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17536/) (2024)
- [Decoupling Representation and Knowledge for Few-Shot Intent Classification and Slot Filling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.13495/) (2023)
- [A Two-Stage Prediction-Aware Contrastive Learning Framework for Multi-Intent NLU](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.02925/) (2024)
- [Few-Shot NLU with Vector Projection Distance and Abstract Triangular CRF](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.04999/) (2021)
- [Multi-Intent Spoken Language Understanding: Methods, Trends, and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.11258/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In this paper, we investigate few-shot joint learning for dialogue language understanding. Most existing few-shot models learn a single task each time with only a few examples. However, dialogue language understanding contains two closely related tasks, i.e., intent detection and slot filling, and often benefits from jointly learning the two tasks. This calls for new few-shot learning techniques that are able to capture task relations from only a few examples and jointly learn multiple tasks. To achieve this, we propose a similarity-based few-shot learning scheme, named Contrastive Prototype Merging network (ConProm), that learns to bridge metric spaces of intent and slot on data-rich domains, and then adapt the bridged metric space to the specific few-shot domain. Experiments on two public datasets, Snips and FewJoint, show that our model significantly outperforms the strong baselines in one and five shots settings.