# A Unified Framework for Multi-intent Spoken Language Understanding with prompting

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.03337 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03337/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 22 of its 40 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Oct 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 22 of 22)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [The Power of Scale for Parameter-Efficient Prompt Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08691/) (2021)
- [Pre-train, Prompt, and Predict: A Systematic Survey of Prompting Methods in Natural Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.13586/) (2021)
- [BERT for Joint Intent Classification and Slot Filling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.10909/) (2019)
- [Structured Prediction as Translation between Augmented Natural Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.05779/) (2021)
- [Template-Based Named Entity Recognition Using BART](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.01760/) (2021)
- [Multi-Task Pre-Training for Plug-and-Play Task-Oriented Dialogue System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.14739/) (2021)
- [Adapting Language Models for Zero-shot Learning by Meta-tuning on Dataset and Prompt Collections](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.04670/) (2021)
- [A Stack-Propagation Framework with Token-Level Intent Detection for Spoken Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.02188/) (2019)
- [A Novel Bi-directional Interrelated Model for Joint Intent Detection and Slot Filling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.00390/) (2019)
- [Joint Slot Filling and Intent Detection via Capsule Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.09471/) (2018)
- [GL-GIN: Fast and Accurate Non-Autoregressive Model for Joint Multiple Intent Detection and Slot Filling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.01925/) (2021)
- [InstructionNER: A Multi-Task Instruction-Based Generative Framework for Few-shot NER](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.03903/) (2022)
- [An Enhanced Span-based Decomposition Method for Few-Shot Sequence Labeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.13023/) (2021)
- [Joint Multiple Intent Detection and Slot Filling via Self-distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.08042/) (2021)
- [GenSF: Simultaneous Adaptation of Generative Pre-trained Models and Slot Filling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.07055/) (2021)
- [SLIM: Explicit Slot-Intent Mapping with BERT for Joint Multi-Intent Detection and Slot Filling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.11711/) (2021)
- [Improved and Efficient Conversational Slot Labeling through Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02123/) (2022)
- [A Joint and Domain-Adaptive Approach to Spoken Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.11768/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Can ChatGPT Detect Intent? Evaluating Large Language Models for Spoken Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13512/) (2023)
- [Multi-Intent Spoken Language Understanding: Methods, Trends, and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.11258/) (2025)
- [SFL-MTSC: Leveraging Semantic Frame-Level Multi-Task Self-Consistency for Robust Multi-Intent Spoken Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.25552/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Multi-intent Spoken Language Understanding has great potential for widespread implementation. Jointly modeling Intent Detection and Slot Filling in it provides a channel to exploit the correlation between intents and slots. However, current approaches are apt to formulate these two sub-tasks differently, which leads to two issues: 1) It hinders models from effective extraction of shared features. 2) Pretty complicated structures are involved to enhance expression ability while causing damage to the interpretability of frameworks. In this work, we describe a Prompt-based Spoken Language Understanding (PromptSLU) framework, to intuitively unify two sub-tasks into the same form by offering a common pre-trained Seq2Seq model. In detail, ID and SF are completed by concisely filling the utterance into task-specific prompt templates as input, and sharing output formats of key-value pairs sequence. Furthermore, variable intents are predicted first, then naturally embedded into prompts to guide slot-value pairs inference from a semantic perspective. Finally, we are inspired by prevalent multi-task learning to introduce an auxiliary sub-task, which helps to learn relationships among provided labels. Experiment results show that our framework outperforms several state-of-the-art baselines on two public datasets.