A Survey of Joint Intent Detection and Slot Filling Models in Natural Language Understanding

Intent classification, to identify the speaker’s intention, and slot filling, to label each token with a semantic type, are critical tasks in natural language understanding. Traditionally the two tasks have been addressed independently. More recently joint models that address the two tasks together have achieved state-of-the-art performance for each task and have shown there exists a strong relationship between the two. In this survey, we bring the coverage of methods up to 2021 including the many applications of deep learning in the field. As well as a technological survey, we look at issues addressed in the joint task and the approaches designed to address these issues. We cover datasets, evaluation metrics, and experiment design and supply a summary of reported performance on the standard datasets.