Z-BERT-A: a zero-shot Pipeline for Unknown Intent detection

Intent discovery is a fundamental task in NLP, and it is increasingly relevant for a variety of industrial applications (Quarteroni 2018). The main challenge resides in the need to identify from input utterances novel unseen in-tents. Herein, we propose Z-BERT-A, a two-stage method for intent discovery relying on a Transformer architecture (Vaswani et al. 2017; Devlin et al. 2018), fine-tuned with Adapters (Pfeiffer et al. 2020), initially trained for Natural Language Inference (NLI), and later applied for unknown in-tent classification in a zero-shot setting. In our evaluation, we firstly analyze the quality of the model after adaptive fine-tuning on known classes. Secondly, we evaluate its performance casting intent classification as an NLI task. Lastly, we test the zero-shot performance of the model on unseen classes, showing how Z-BERT-A can effectively perform in-tent discovery by generating intents that are semantically similar, if not equal, to the ground truth ones. Our experiments show how Z-BERT-A is outperforming a wide variety of baselines in two zero-shot settings: known intents classification and unseen intent discovery. The proposed pipeline holds the potential to be widely applied in a variety of application for customer care. It enables automated dynamic triage using a lightweight model that, unlike large language models, can be easily deployed and scaled in a wide variety of business scenarios. Especially when considering a setting with limited hardware availability and performance whereon-premise or low resource cloud deployments are imperative. Z-BERT-A, predicting novel intents from a single utterance, represents an innovative approach for intent discovery, enabling online generation of novel intents. The pipeline is available as an installable python package at the following link: https://github.com/GT4SD/zberta.