Joint intent and entity recognition using transformer models

Abstract

Systems described herein may use transformer-based machine classifiers to perform a variety of natural language understanding tasks including, but not limited to sentence classification, named entity recognition, sentence similarity, and question answering. The exceptional performance of transformer-based language models is due to their ability to capture long-term temporal dependencies in input sequences. Machine classifiers may be trained using training data sets for multiple tasks, such as but not limited to sentence classification tasks and sequence labeling tasks. Loss masking may be employed in the machine classifier to jointly train the machine classifier on multiple tasks simultaneously. The user of transformer encoders in the machine classifiers, which treat each output sequence independently of other output sequences, in accordance with aspects of the invention do not require joint labeling to model tasks.