Using Convolutional Neural Network with BERT for Intent Determination

We propose an Intent Determination (ID) method by combining the single-layer Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) with the Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT). The ID task is usually treated as a classification issue and the user’s query statement is usually of short text type. It has been proven that CNN is suitable for conducting short text classification tasks. We utilize BERT as a sentence encoder, which can accurately get the context representation of a sentence. Our method improves the performance of ID with the powerful ability to capture semantic and long-distance dependencies in sentences. Our experimental results demonstrate that our model outperforms the state-of-the-art approach and improves the accuracy of 0.67% on the ATIS dataset. On the ground truth of the Chinese dataset, as the intent granularity increases, our method improves the accuracy by 15.99%, 4.75%, 4.69%, 6.29%, and 4.12% compared to the baseline.