Abstract: Task-oriented dialog systems need to know when a query falls outside their range of supported intents, but current text classification corpora only define label sets that cover every example. We introduce a new dataset that includes queries that are out-of-scope---i.e., queries that do not fall into any of the system's supported intents. This poses a new challenge because models cannot assume that every query at inference time belongs to a system-supported intent class. Our dataset also covers 150 intent classes over 10 domains, capturing the breadth that a production task-oriented agent must handle. We evaluate a range of benchmark classifiers on our dataset along with several different out-of-scope identification schemes. We find that while the classifiers perform well on in-scope intent classification, they struggle to identify out-of-scope queries. Our dataset and evaluation fill an important gap in the field, offering a way of more rigorously and realistically benchmarking text classification in task-driven dialog systems.

Introduction: Task-oriented dialog systems have become ubiquitous, providing a means for billions of people to interact with computers using natural language. Moreover, the recent influx of platforms and tools such as Google's DialogFlow or Amazon's Lex for building and deploying such systems makes them even more accessible to various industries and demographics across the globe. Tools for developing such systems start by guiding developers to collect training data for intent classification: the task of identifying which of a fixed set of actions the user wishes to take based on their query. Relatively few public datasets exist for evaluating performance on this task, and those that do exist typically cover only a very small number of intents (e.g. BIBREF0, which has 7 intents). Furthermore, such resources do not facilitate analysis of out-of-scope queries: queries that users may reasonably make, but fall outside of the scope of the system-supported intents. Figure FIGREF1 shows example query-response exchanges between a user and a task-driven dialog system for personal finance. In the first user-system exchange, the system correctly identifies the user's intent as an in-scope balance query. In the second and third exchanges, the user queries with out-of-scope inputs. In the second exchange, the system incorrectly identifies the query as in-scope and yields an unrelated response. In the third exchange, the system correctly classifies the user's query as out-of-scope, and yields a fallback response. Out-of-scope queries are inevitable for a task-oriented dialog system, as most users will not be fully cognizant of the system's capabilities, which are limited by the fixed number of intent classes. Correctly identifying out-of-scope cases is thus crucial in deployed systems—both to avoid performing the wrong action and also to identify potential future directions for development. However, this problem has seen little attention in analyses and evaluations of intent classification systems. This paper fills this gap by analyzing intent classification performance with a focus on out-of-scope handling. To do so, we constructed a new dataset with 23,700 queries that are short and unstructured, in the same style made by real users of task-oriented systems. The queries cover 150 intents, plus out-of-scope queries that do not fall within any of the 150 in-scope intents. We evaluate a range of benchmark classifiers and out-of-scope handling methods on our dataset. BERT BIBREF1 yields the best in-scope accuracy, scoring 96% or above even when we limit the training data or introduce class imbalance. However, all methods struggle with identifying out-of-scope queries. Even when a large number of out-of-scope examples are provided for training, there is a major performance gap, with the best system scoring 66% out-of-scope recall. Our results show that while current models work on known classes, they have difficulty on out-of-scope queries, particularly when data is not plentiful. This dataset will enable future work to address this key gap in the research and development of dialog systems. All data introduced in this paper can be found at https://github.com/clinc/oos-eval.

Question: Where does the data come from?
Answer: For ins scope data collection:crowd workers which provide questions and commands related to topic domains and additional data the rephrase and scenario crowdsourcing tasks proposed by BIBREF2 is used. 
For out of scope data collection:  from workers mistakes-queries written for one of the 150 intents that did not actually match any of the intents and using scoping and scenario tasks with prompts based on topic areas found on Quora, Wikipedia, and elsewhere.