# IntenDD: A Unified Contrastive Learning Approach for Intent Detection and Discovery

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.16761 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.16761/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 27 of its 51 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 Oct 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 27 of 27)

- [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)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [OPT: Open Pre-trained Transformer Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.01068/) (2022)
- [Don't Stop Pretraining: Adapt Language Models to Domains and Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.10964/) (2020)
- [Revisiting Semi-Supervised Learning with Graph Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.08861/) (2016)
- [Unsupervised Deep Embedding for Clustering Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.06335/) (2015)
- [Efficient Intent Detection with Dual Sentence Encoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.04807/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Towards K-means-friendly Spaces: Simultaneous Deep Learning and Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.04794/) (2016)
- [Combining Label Propagation and Simple Models Out-performs Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.13993/) (2020)
- [CLEAR: Contrastive Learning for Sentence Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15466/) (2020)
- [Benchmarking Natural Language Understanding Services for building Conversational Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.05566/) (2019)
- [Semantic Parsing for Task Oriented Dialog using Hierarchical Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.07942/) (2018)
- [DialoGLUE: A Natural Language Understanding Benchmark for Task-Oriented Dialogue](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.13570/) (2020)
- [Fast, Effective, and Self-Supervised: Transforming Masked Language Models into Universal Lexical and Sentence Encoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08027/) (2021)
- [Discovering New Intents with Deep Aligned Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.08987/) (2020)
- [Discovering New Intents via Constrained Deep Adaptive Clustering with Cluster Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.08891/) (2019)
- [Discriminative Nearest Neighbor Few-Shot Intent Detection by Transferring Natural Language Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.13009/) (2020)
- [Few-Shot Intent Detection via Contrastive Pre-Training and Fine-Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.06349/) (2021)
- [Example-Driven Intent Prediction with Observers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.08684/) (2020)
- [ConvFiT: Conversational Fine-Tuning of Pretrained Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.10126/) (2021)
- [TEXTOIR: An Integrated and Visualized Platform for Text Open Intent Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.15063/) (2021)
- [Selective In-Context Data Augmentation for Intent Detection using Pointwise V-Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.05096/) (2023)
- [The Devil is in the Details: On Models and Training Regimes for Few-Shot Intent Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.06440/) (2022)

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

- [ARISE: Iterative Rule Induction and Synthetic Data Generation for Text Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.05923/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Identifying intents from dialogue utterances forms an integral component of task-oriented dialogue systems. Intent-related tasks are typically formulated either as a classification task, where the utterances are classified into predefined categories or as a clustering task when new and previously unknown intent categories need to be discovered from these utterances. Further, the intent classification may be modeled in a multiclass (MC) or multilabel (ML) setup. While typically these tasks are modeled as separate tasks, we propose IntenDD, a unified approach leveraging a shared utterance encoding backbone. IntenDD uses an entirely unsupervised contrastive learning strategy for representation learning, where pseudo-labels for the unlabeled utterances are generated based on their lexical features. Additionally, we introduce a two-step post-processing setup for the classification tasks using modified adsorption. Here, first, the residuals in the training data are propagated followed by smoothing the labels both modeled in a transductive setting. Through extensive evaluations on various benchmark datasets, we find that our approach consistently outperforms competitive baselines across all three tasks. On average, IntenDD reports percentage improvements of 2.32%, 1.26%, and 1.52% in their respective metrics for few-shot MC, few-shot ML, and the intent discovery tasks respectively.