Proceedings of International Conference on Applied Innovation in IT  ·  2019/03/06  ·  Vol. 7  ·  Issue 1  ·  pp. 73–78
Question Embeddings Based on Shannon Entropy. Solving intent classification task in goal-oriented dialogue system
Aleksandr Perevalov, Daniil Kurushin, Rustam Faizrakhmanov, Farida Khabibrakhmanova
Question-answering systems and voice assistants are becoming major part of client service departments of many organizations, helping them to reduce the labor costs of staff. In many such systems, there is always natural language understanding module that solves intent classification task. This task is complicated because of its case-dependency – every subject area has its own semantic kernel. The state of art approaches for intent classification are different machine learning and deep learning methods that use text vector representations as input. The basic vector representation models such as Bag of words and TF-IDF generate sparse matrixes, which are becoming very big as the amount of input data grows. Modern methods such as word2vec and FastText use neural networks to evaluate word embeddings with fixed dimension size. As we are developing a question-answering system for students and enrollees of the Perm National Research Polytechnic University, we have faced the problem of user’s intent detection. The subject area of our system is very specific, that is why there is a lack of training data. This aspect makes intent classification task more challenging for using state of the art deep learning methods. In this paper, we propose an approach of the questions embeddings representation based on calculation of Shannon entropy. The goal of the approach is to produce low dimensional question vectors as neural approaches do and to outperform related methods, described above in condition of small dataset. We evaluate and compare our model with existing ones using logistic regression and dataset that contains questions asked by students and enrollees. The data is labeled into six classes. Experimental comparison of proposed approach and other models revealed that proposed model performed better in the given task.
Text Classification Word Embeddings Shannon Entropy Intent Classification Natural Language Processing Dialogue Systems Word2vec FastText.
References
  1. Harris, Zellig, “Distributional structure,” In: Word, S. , no. 23, pp.146-162, 1954.
  2. Mikolov, Tomas, Chen, Kai, Corrado, Greg and Dean, Jeffrey. “Efficient estimation of word representations in vector space,” arXiv preprint arXiv:1301.3781, 2013.
  3. Joulin, Armand, Grave, Edouard, Bojanowski, Piotr, Douze, Matthijs, Jégou, Hervé and Mikolov, Tomas, “FastText.zip: Compressing text classification models,” arXiv preprint arXiv:1612.03651, 2016.
  4. Turney, Peter D, Pantel, Patrick and others, “From frequency to meaning: Vector space models of semantics,”Journal of artificial intelligence research 37 , no. 1, pp. 141-188, 2010.
  5. Pagliardini, Matteo, Gupta, Prakhar and Jaggi, Martin, “Unsupervised Learning of Sentence Embeddings using Compositional n-Gram Features,” arXiv preprint arXiv:1703.02507, 2017.
  6. Le, Quoc V and Mikolov, Tomas, “Distributed Representations of Sentences and Documents,” Paper presented at the meeting of the ICML, 2014.
  7. K. Shridhar, A. Dash, A. Sahu, G. Grund Pihlgren, P. Alonso, V. Pondenkandath, G. Kovacs, F. Simistira, M. Liwicki, “Subword Semantic Hashing for Intent Classification on Small Datasets,” arXiv preprint arXiv:1810.07150, 2018.
  8. G. Salton, C. Buckley, “Term-weighing approache sin automatic text retrieval,” In Information Processing & Management, no. 24(5), pp. 513-523, 1988.
  9. G. H. Golub, C. F. Van Loan, “Matrix computations. Third Edition,” The John Hopkins University Press, 1996.
  10. Vajapeyam, Sriram, “Understanding Shannon's Entropy metric for Information,” arXiv preprint arXiv:1405.2061, 2014.
  11. A. Joulin, E. Grave, P. Bojanowski, T. Mikolov, “Bag of Tricks for Efficient Text Classification,” arXiv preprint arXiv:1607.01759, 2016.

Proceedings of the International Conference on Applied Innovations in IT by Anhalt University of Applied Sciences is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0  ·  This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License

ICAIIT 2026
International Conference on Applied Innovation in IT
Navigation
Publisher
ISSN2199-8876
Location Anhalt University of Applied Sciences
Phone +49 (0) 3496 67 5611
Address Building 01, Room 425
Bernburger Str. 55
D-06366 Köthen, Germany
Open Access License

All works are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-SA 4.0), unless otherwise noted.

Published by ICAIIT in cooperation with Anhalt University of Applied Sciences.

© 2026 ICAIIT — International Conference on Applied Innovations in IT. Anhalt University of Applied Sciences, Köthen, Germany.
Visitors: site traffic counter