FastText-Based Intent Detection for Inflected Languages

Abstract

Intent detection is one of the main tasks of a dialogue system. In this paper, we present our intent detection system that is based on fastText word embeddings and a neural network classifier. We find an improvement in fastText sentence vectorization, which, in some cases, shows a significant increase in intent detection accuracy. We evaluate the system on languages commonly spoken in Baltic countries—Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian, English, and Russian. The results show that our intent detection system provides state-of-the-art results on three previously published datasets, outperforming many popular services. In addition to this, for Latvian, we explore how the accuracy of intent detection is affected if we normalize the text in advance.