  User intent detection plays a critical role in question-answering and dialog
systems. Most previous works treat intent detection as a classification problem
where utterances are labeled with predefined intents. However, it is
labor-intensive and time-consuming to label users' utterances as intents are
diversely expressed and novel intents will continually be involved. Instead, we
study the zero-shot intent detection problem, which aims to detect emerging
user intents where no labeled utterances are currently available. We propose
two capsule-based architectures: INTENT-CAPSNET that extracts semantic features
from utterances and aggregates them to discriminate existing intents, and
INTENTCAPSNET-ZSL which gives INTENTCAPSNET the zero-shot learning ability to
discriminate emerging intents via knowledge transfer from existing intents.
Experiments on two real-world datasets show that our model not only can better
discriminate diversely expressed existing intents, but is also able to
discriminate emerging intents when no labeled utterances are available.
