Graph-based semi-supervised learning for natural language understanding

Abstract

Semi-supervised learning is an efficient method to augment training data automatically from unlabeled data. Development of many natural language understanding (NLU) applications has a challenge where unlabeled data is relatively abundant while labeled data is rather limited. In this work, we propose transductive graphbased semi-supervised learning models as well as their inductive variants for NLU. We evaluate the approach's applicability using publicly available NLU data and models. In order to find similar utterances and construct a graph, we use a paraphrase detection model. Results show that applying the inductive graph-based semi-supervised learning can improve the error rate of the NLU model by 5%.