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.