Exploring Named Entity Recognition As an Auxiliary Task for Slot Filling in Conversational Language Understanding

Slot filling is a crucial task in the Natural Language Understanding (NLU) component of a dialogue system. Most approaches for this task rely solely on the domain-specific datasets for training. We propose a joint model of slot filling and Named Entity Recognition (NER) in a multi-task learning (MTL) setup. Our experiments on three slot filling datasets show that using NER as an auxiliary task improves slot filling performance and achieve competitive performance compared with state-of-the art. In particular, NER is effective when supervised at the lower layer of the model. For low-resource scenarios, we found that MTL is effective for one dataset.