Self-Supervised Task Augmentation for Few-Shot Intent Detection

Few-shot intent detection is a practical challenge task,because new intents are frequently emerging and collecting large-scale data for them could be costly.Meta-learning,a promising technique for leveraging data from previous tasks to enable efficient learning of new tasks,has been a popular way to tackle this problem.However,the existing meta-learning models have been evidenced to be overfitting when the meta-training tasks are insufficient.To overcome this challenge,we present a novel self-supervised task augmentation with meta-learning framework,namely STAM.Firstly,we introduce the task augmentation,which explores two different strategies and combines them to extend meta-training tasks.Secondly,we devise two auxiliary losses for integrating self-supervised learning into meta-learning to learn more generalizable and transferable features.Experimental results show that STAM can achieve consistent and considerable performance improvement to existing state-of-the-art methods on four datasets.