  Identifying new user intents is an essential task in the dialogue system.
However, it is hard to get satisfying clustering results since the definition
of intents is strongly guided by prior knowledge. Existing methods incorporate
prior knowledge by intensive feature engineering, which not only leads to
overfitting but also makes it sensitive to the number of clusters. In this
paper, we propose constrained deep adaptive clustering with cluster refinement
(CDAC+), an end-to-end clustering method that can naturally incorporate
pairwise constraints as prior knowledge to guide the clustering process.
Moreover, we refine the clusters by forcing the model to learn from the high
confidence assignments. After eliminating low confidence assignments, our
approach is surprisingly insensitive to the number of clusters. Experimental
results on the three benchmark datasets show that our method can yield
significant improvements over strong baselines.
