Question: Compare with most other analyses and datasets, what's characteristic of the out-of-scope queries in this paper?
Evidence: In most other analyses and datasets, the idea of out-of-scope data is not considered, and instead the output classes are intended to cover all possible queries (e.g., TREC BIBREF7). Recent work by BIBREF8 considers a similar problem they call out-of-distribution detection. They use other datasets or classes excluded during training to form the out-of-distribution samples. This means that the out-of-scope samples are from a small set of coherent classes that differ substantially from the in-distribution samples. Similar experiments were conducted for evaluating unknown intent discovery models in BIBREF9. In contrast, our out-of-scope queries cover a broad range of phenomena and are similar in style and often similar in topic to in-scope queries, representing things a user might say given partial knowledge of the capabilities of a system.
Table TABREF20 compares our dataset with other short-query intent classification datasets. The Snips BIBREF0 dataset and the dataset presented in BIBREF10 are the most similar to the in-scope part of our work, with the same type of conversational agent requests. Like our work, both of these datasets were bootstrapped using crowdsourcing. However, the Snips dataset has only a small number of intents and an enormous number of examples of each. Snips does present a low-data variation, with 70 training queries per intent, in which performance drops slightly. The dataset presented in BIBREF10 has a large number of intent classes, yet also contains a wide range of samples per intent class (ranging from 24 to 5,981 queries per intent, and so is not constrained in all cases).
BIBREF11 created datasets with constrained training data, but with very few intents, presenting a very different type of challenge. We also include the TREC query classification datasets BIBREF7, which have a large set of labels, but they describe the desired response type (e.g., distance, city, abbreviation) rather than the action intents we consider. Moreover, TREC contains only questions and no commands. Crucially, none of the other datasets summarized in Table TABREF20 offer a feasible way to evaluate out-of-scope performance.
The Dialog State Tracking Challenge (DSTC) datasets are another related resource. Specifically, DSTC 1 BIBREF12, DSTC 2 BIBREF13, and DSTC 3 BIBREF14 contain “chatbot style" queries, but the datasets are focused on state tracking. Moreover, most if not all queries in these datasets are in-scope. In contrast, the focus of our analysis is on both in- and out-of-scope queries that challenge a virtual assistant to determine whether it can provide an acceptable response.
In contrast, our out-of-scope queries cover a broad range of phenomena and are similar in style and often similar in topic to in-scope queries, representing things a user might say given partial knowledge of the capabilities of a system.
Answer: The out-of-scope queries cover a broad range of phenomena and are similar in style and often similar in topic to in-scope queries, representing things a user might say given partial knowledge of the capabilities of a system.