Adversarial Semantic Decoupling for Recognizing Open-Vocabulary Slots

Abstract

Open-vocabulary slots, such as file name, album name, or schedule title, significantly degrade the performance of neural-based slot filling models since these slots can take on values from a virtually unlimited set and have no semantic restriction nor a length limit. In this paper, we propose a robust adversarial model-agnostic slot filling method that explicitly decouples local semantics inherent in open-vocabulary slot words from the global context. We aim to depart entangled contextual semantics and focus more on the holistic context at the level of the whole sentence. Experiments on two public datasets show that our method consistently outperforms other methods with a statistically significant margin on all the open-vocabulary slots without deteriorating the performance of normal slots.