arXiv Machine Learning

Selecting Open-Weight Language Models for Zero-Shot Intent Classification: A Systematic Evaluation of 41 Models

arXiv:2607. 27421v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Intent classification is a core component of task-oriented dialogue systems, yet practitioners have limited systematic guidance for selecting deployable open-weight language models under compute, latency, and robustness constraints.

arXiv AI
Aug 12

A Cost-Efficient Routing Pipeline for Multilingual Short-Text Classification Using Small Language Models

arXiv:2608. 10939v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multilingual short-text classification supports operational systems such as content moderation, customer support routing, and intent recognition, yet aggregate evaluation often hides large differences between high-resource and low-resource languages.

By Wajdi Ben Saad, Safa Madiouni
arXiv AI
Aug 24

When Do LLMs Replace Fine-Tuned NLU? A Decision Framework for Intent Detection in Production Conversational Systems

The paper evaluates whether zero‑shot large language models (LLMs) can replace fine‑tuned natural language understanding (NLU) classifiers for intent detection in conversational systems. Experiments on ATIS and CLINC150 show that fine‑tuned RoBERTa outperforms Claude Haiku zero‑shot when ample in‑domain labels are available, but the LLM matches the supervised model on the broader 150‑intent CLINC150 schema. The authors identify three production‑relevant scenarios where LLMs excel—out‑of‑scope detection, robustness to ASR noise, and dynamic per‑deployment schemas—and present a decision framework to guide practitioners. whyItMatters:"The study provides concrete evidence and a practical framework for deciding when to deploy LLMs versus fine‑tuned models in real‑world conversational applications."

By Carson Rodrigues, Oysturn Vas
arXiv AI
Aug 25

Aslema at NADI 2026: Data Augmentation for Intent Recognition and Slot Filling

The paper introduces Aslema, a system for the NADI 2026 Shared Task 5, which includes intent recognition and slot filling. The authors evaluate four omni LLMs in zero‑shot and fine‑tuned settings, finding that fine‑tuning consistently outperforms zero‑shot inference. They further augment data by generating culturally grounded Tunisian Derja utterances with an LLM and synthetic speech via voice cloning, which improves performance; the final system based on Qwen3‑Omni‑30B achieves 86.8% intent accuracy and 34.7 WER on devtest, ranking 1st in slot filling and 4th in intent recognition on the official test set.

By Tajwaar Shafiq, Hunzalah Hassan Bhatti, Firoj Alam, Shammur Absar Chowdhury
arXiv AI
Aug 20

Aslema at NADI 2026: Augmentation through Fewshot for SLU

Aslema is a system developed for the NADI 2026 Shared Task 5, which involves intent recognition and slot filling. The team evaluated four omni LLMs in a zero‑shot setting and found that fine‑tuned models consistently outperform zero‑shot inference. They further improved performance by augmenting data with culturally grounded Tunisian Derja utterances generated by an LLM and synthetic speech produced via voice cloning, achieving top‑ranked results on the official test set.

By Tajwaar Shafiq, Hunzalah Hassan Bhatti, Shammur Absar Chowdhury, Firoj Alam
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 3

TalkFa: A Unified Benchmark for Farsi Dialogue Generation and Understanding

TalkFa introduces a unified benchmark for Farsi dialogue generation and understanding, comprising three datasets: WIKI‑FADIAL (4.2K Wikipedia‑grounded dialogues), DAILYDIALOG‑FA (6.6K dialogues with dialogue‑act and emotion annotations), and PLAYDIAL‑FA (2.1K theatrical dialogues with sentiment labels). All dialogues are curated through multi‑stage review by native speakers, ensuring high quality. Experiments show that LoRA fine‑tuning improves generation performance with less data, while specific models excel on classification tasks, and human evaluation confirms the benchmark’s reliability.

By Neda Jamshidi, Kamyar Zeinalipour, Fahimeh Akbari, Monica Bianchini, Marco Maggini, Marco Gori
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 11

E-CONAN (Entailment, CONtradition And Neutral) Benchmarks: Arabic Textual Entailment and Natural Inference Datasets

E-CONAN introduces Arabic textual entailment and natural inference benchmarks comprising two datasets: E-CONAN-2 (2-way RTE) and E-CONAN-3 (3-way NLI). The datasets are built from automatically-translated pairs, human-validated machine translations, hand-crafted pairs from Arabic teaching books, and rumor-containing news headlines. The authors evaluated nine multilingual pretrained models and five large language models on these benchmarks, demonstrating that E-CONAN offers a more diverse and robust assessment than existing datasets like XNLI and ArNLI.

By Khloud AL Jallad, Nada Ghneim, Ghaida Rebdawi
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 5

Domain-Adapted Small Language Models with Hybrid Post-Processing: Achieving Cost-Efficient, Low-Latency Multi-Label Structured Prediction via LoRA Fine-Tuning on Scarce Data

arXiv:2606. 05781v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Deploying frontier large language models (LLMs) for domain-specific structured evaluation tasks often incurs substantial latency, cost, and data privacy overhead.

By Srinivasan Manoharan, Dilipkumar Nallusamy, Sachin Kumar, Haifeng Wu