# Multi-Intent Spoken Language Understanding: Methods, Trends, and Challenges

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.11258 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.11258/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 74 of its 147 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Dec 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 74)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [The Llama 3 Herd of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21783/) (2024)
- [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)
- [Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09288/) (2023)
- [Mixtral of Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.04088/) (2024)
- [ConceptNet 5.5: An Open Multilingual Graph of General Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03975/) (2016)
- [A Comprehensive Survey of Continual Learning: Theory, Method and Application](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.00487/) (2023)
- [Snips Voice Platform: an embedded Spoken Language Understanding system for private-by-design voice interfaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.10190/) (2018)
- [SLURP: A Spoken Language Understanding Resource Package](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13205/) (2020)
- [MTOP: A Comprehensive Multilingual Task-Oriented Semantic Parsing Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.09335/) (2020)
- [MASSIVE: A 1M-Example Multilingual Natural Language Understanding Dataset with 51 Typologically-Diverse Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.08582/) (2022)
- [Attention-Based Recurrent Neural Network Models for Joint Intent Detection and Slot Filling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.01454/) (2016)
- [Survey on Evaluation Methods for Dialogue Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.04071/) (2019)
- [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)
- [End-to-End Slot Alignment and Recognition for Cross-Lingual NLU](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.14353/) (2020)
- [Large Language Models are Few-Shot Summarizers: Multi-Intent Comment Generation via In-Context Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.11384/) (2023)
- [A Co-Interactive Transformer for Joint Slot Filling and Intent Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.03880/) (2020)
- [SpanNER: Named Entity Re-/Recognition as Span Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.00641/) (2021)
- [A Bi-model based RNN Semantic Frame Parsing Model for Intent Detection and Slot Filling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.10235/) (2018)
- [A Survey on Spoken Language Understanding: Recent Advances and New Frontiers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.03095/) (2021)
- [Recent Neural Methods on Slot Filling and Intent Classification for Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.00564/) (2020)
- [Positive-incentive Noise](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09541/) (2022)
- [Variational Positive-incentive Noise: How Noise Benefits Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.07651/) (2023)
- [Few-shot Intent Classification and Slot Filling with Retrieved Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.05763/) (2021)
- [CM-Net: A Novel Collaborative Memory Network for Spoken Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.06937/) (2019)
- [SPACE-3: Unified Dialog Model Pre-training for Task-Oriented Dialog Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.06664/) (2022)
- [Enhance Vision-Language Alignment with Noise](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.10817/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Multi-intent spoken language understanding (SLU) involves two tasks: multiple intent detection and slot filling, which jointly handle utterances containing more than one intent. Owing to this characteristic, which closely reflects real-world applications, the task has attracted increasing research attention, and substantial progress has been achieved. However, there remains a lack of a comprehensive and systematic review of existing studies on multi-intent SLU. To this end, this paper presents a survey of recent advances in multi-intent SLU. We provide an in-depth overview of previous research from two perspectives: decoding paradigms and modeling approaches. On this basis, we further compare the performance of representative models and analyze their strengths and limitations. Finally, we discuss the current challenges and outline promising directions for future research. We hope this survey will offer valuable insights and serve as a useful reference for advancing research in multi-intent SLU.