Few-Shot Query Intent Detection via Relation-Aware Prompt Learning

Abstract

Intent detection is a crucial component of modern conversational systems, since accurately identifying user intent at the beginning of a conversation is essential for generating effective responses. Recent efforts have focused on studying this problem under a challenging few-shot scenario. These approaches primarily leverage large-scale unlabeled dialogue text corpora to pretrain language models through various pretext tasks, followed by fine-tuning for intent detection with very limited annotations. Despite the improvements achieved, existing methods have predominantly focused on textual data, neglecting to effectively capture the crucial structural information inherent in conversational systems, such as the query-query relation and query-answer relation. To address this gap, we propose SAID, a novel framework that integrates both textual and relational structure information in a unified manner for model pretraining for the first time. Building on this framework, we further propose a novel mechanism, the query-adaptive attention network (QueryAdapt), which operates at the relation token level by generating intent-specific relation tokens from well-learned query-query and query-answer relations explicitly, enabling more fine-grained knowledge transfer. Extensive experimental results on two real-world datasets demonstrate that SAID significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods.