Intent Slot Classification

Understanding the intent in natural language (Intent Classification) and extracting values of pertinent attributes or specific pieces of information from a sentence (Slot Filling) are two essential tasks in Natural Language Understanding (NLU). For example:

In the query: What is the weather in Santa Clara tomorrow morning? we would like to classify the query as a weather Intent, and detect Santa Clara as a location slot and tomorrow morning as a date_time slot. Intents and Slots names are usually task specific and defined as labels in the training data. This is a fundamental step that is executed in any task-driven Conversational Assistant.

Recent research has shown the proficiency of BERT models in this task. TLT provides the capability to train a BERT model and perform inference for both intent detection and slot filling together.

The best place to get started with TAO Toolkit - Intent and Slot Classification would be the TAO - Intent and Slot Classification jupyter notebook. This resource has two notebooks included.

1. Training: Workflow for training an intent slot classification model and export the model to a .riva file
2. Deployment: Workflow to consume the .riva file and deploy it to Riva.

If you are a seasoned Conversation AI developer we recommend installing TAO and referring to the TAO documentation for usage information.

Pre-Requisites

Please make sure to install the following before proceeding further:

• python 3.6.9
• docker-ce > 19.03.5
• docker-API 1.40
• nvidia-container-toolkit > 1.3.0-1
• nvidia-container-runtime > 3.4.0-1
• nvidia-docker2 > 2.5.0-1
• nvidia-driver >= 455.23

Note: A compatible NVIDIA GPU would be required.

Installation

We recommend that you install TAO Toolkit inside a virtual environment. The steps to do the same are as follows

virtualenv -p python3 
source /bin/activate
pip install jupyter notebook # If you need to run the notebooks

TAO Toolkit is a python package that is hosted in nvidia python package index. You may install by using python’s package manager, pip.

pip install nvidia-pyindex
pip install nvidia-tao

To download the jupyter notebook please:

1. Download the samples using the ngc cli with the following command

ngc registry resource download-version "nvidia/tao/intentslotclassification_notebook:v1.0"

2. Instantiate the jupyter notebook server

jupyter notebook --ip 0.0.0.0 --allow-root --port 8888

License

By downloading and using the models and resources packaged with TAO Toolkit Conversational AI, you would be accepting the terms of the Riva license