Deploying task-oriented dialog ToD systems for new domains and tasks requires natural language understanding models that are 1) resource-efficient and work under low-data regimes; 2) adaptable, efficient, and quick-to-train; 3) expressive and can handle complex ToD scenarios with multiple user intents in a single utterance. Motivated by these requirements, we introduce a novel framework for multi-label intent detection (mID): MultI-ConvFiT (Multi-Label Intent Detection via Contrastive Conversational Fine-Tuning). While previous work on efficient single-label intent detection learns a classifier on top of a fixed sentence encoder (SE), we propose to 1) transform general-purpose SEs into task-specialized SEs via contrastive fine-tuning on annotated multi-label data, 2) where task specialization knowledge can be stored into lightweight adapter modules without updating the original parameters of the input SE, and then 3) we build improved mID classifiers stacked on top of fixed specialized SEs. Our main results indicate that MultI-ConvFiT yields effective mID models, with large gains over non-specialized SEs reported across a spectrum of different mID datasets, both in low-data and high-data regimes.

We present a systematic study on multilingual and cross-lingual intent detection (ID) from spoken data. The study leverages a new resource put forth in this work, termed MInDS-14, a first training and evaluation resource for the ID task with spoken data. It covers 14 intents extracted from a commercial system in the e-banking domain, associated with spoken examples in 14 diverse language varieties. Our key results indicate that combining machine translation models with state-of-the-art multilingual sentence encoders (e.g., LaBSE) yield strong intent detectors in the majority of target languages covered in MInDS-14, and offer comparative analyses across different axes: e.g., translation direction, impact of speech recognition, data augmentation from a related domain. We see this work as an important step towards more inclusive development and evaluation of multilingual ID from spoken data, hopefully in a much wider spectrum of languages compared to prior work.