Abstract
A model for accurately solving the tasks of intent detection and slot filling requires a substantial amount of user queries annotated manually, which is time-consuming and costly. In this study, in order to circumvent this problem, we propose a method of expanding a training set for handling these two tasks. The data are augmented by applying a random mutation to the training samples, following a set of heuristic rules. For validation of the method, we construct a compound neural architecture composed of a long short-term memory layer, an attention mechanism, and conditional random fields. The experiments conducted on the Automatic Terminal Information Service (ATIS) dataset demonstrate that the models trained on the expanded datasets improve their F-score for the slot-filling task. This improvement is particularly significant for small datasets. We believe that this method allows for the expansion of a small set of previously annotated user queries into a large training set that is sufficient for correctly constructing a model of intent detection and slot filling. Therefore, our approach can be used to save time and money by reducing the amount of data required to train a natural language understanding model. Its novelty consists in expanding a training set for a deep learning model based on a random mutation of training samples, following a set of heuristic rules that utilise external lexicons and the training data itself.