  One of the first steps in the utterance interpretation pipeline of many
task-oriented conversational AI systems is to identify user intents and the
corresponding slots. Since data collection for machine learning models for this
task is time-consuming, it is desirable to make use of existing data in a
high-resource language to train models in low-resource languages. However,
development of such models has largely been hindered by the lack of
multilingual training data. In this paper, we present a new data set of 57k
annotated utterances in English (43k), Spanish (8.6k) and Thai (5k) across the
domains weather, alarm, and reminder. We use this data set to evaluate three
different cross-lingual transfer methods: (1) translating the training data,
(2) using cross-lingual pre-trained embeddings, and (3) a novel method of using
a multilingual machine translation encoder as contextual word representations.
We find that given several hundred training examples in the the target
language, the latter two methods outperform translating the training data.
Further, in very low-resource settings, multilingual contextual word
representations give better results than using cross-lingual static embeddings.
We also compare the cross-lingual methods to using monolingual resources in the
form of contextual ELMo representations and find that given just small amounts
of target language data, this method outperforms all cross-lingual methods,
which highlights the need for more sophisticated cross-lingual methods.
