Intent classification and response selection are two of the core tasks in almost all conversational agents, in addition to many other NLP tasks such as speech recognition, language detection, named entity recognition etc. This master’s project will focus on the task of cross-lingual intent classification which, simply, amounts to recognizing the user’s intent given some input (i.e. the user’s message). Some of the concrete research questions this project may focus on are:
- Given an intent classification model for language L1 (for example, English), can we use this model to bootstrap another intent classification model for language L2 (for example, Norwegian)? This question will rely on cross-lingual transfer learning methods
- Can we build one cross-lingual intent classification model that recognizes the user’s intent in two or more languages? How does such model perform compared to monolingual models trained separately for the corresponding languages?
About Kindly
Kindly is a language technology company based in Oslo. Kindly was founded in 2016 and has since grown to a team of 40+ employees, several of whom have graduated from the Language Technology Group (LTG) at UiO with master’s and doctoral degrees. Natural language processing and machine learning are at the core of the Kindly chatbot platform, which powers the conversational agents for some of the leading enterprises in the Nordics, such as Norwegian Air Shuttle, Elkjøp, Kahoot!, Thon Hotels, and Finn. This master’s project will be carried out in close cooperation with Kindly.