A weakly-supervised approach for discovering new user intents from search query logs

State-of-the art spoken language understanding models that automatically capture user intents in human to machine dialogs are trained with manually annotated data, which is cumbersome and time-consuming to prepare. For bootstrapping the learning algorithm that detects relations in natural language queries to a conversational system, one can rely on publicly available knowledge graphs, such as Freebase, and mine corresponding data from the web. In this paper, we present an unsupervised approach to discover new user intents using a novel Bayesian hierarchical graphical model. Our model employs search query click logs to enrich the information extracted from bootstrapped models. We use the clicked URLs as implicit supervision and extend the knowledge graph based on the relational information discovered from this model. The posteriors from the graphical model relate the newly discovered intents with the search queries. These queries are then used as additional training examples to complement the bootstrapped relation detection models. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach, showing extended coverage to new intents without impacting the known intents.