  Data scarcity is one of the main obstacles of domain adaptation in spoken
language understanding (SLU) due to the high cost of creating manually tagged
SLU datasets. Recent works in neural text generative models, particularly
latent variable models such as variational autoencoder (VAE), have shown
promising results in regards to generating plausible and natural sentences. In
this paper, we propose a novel generative architecture which leverages the
generative power of latent variable models to jointly synthesize fully
annotated utterances. Our experiments show that existing SLU models trained on
the additional synthetic examples achieve performance gains. Our approach not
only helps alleviate the data scarcity issue in the SLU task for many datasets
but also indiscriminately improves language understanding performances for
various SLU models, supported by extensive experiments and rigorous statistical
testing.
