Described herein is a mechanism to identify user intent in requests submitted to a system such as a digital assistant or question-answer systems. Embodiments utilize a match methodology instead of a classification methodology. Features derived from a subgraph retrieved from a knowledge base based on the request are concatenated with pretrained word embeddings for both the request and a candidate predicate. The concatenated inputs for both the request and predicate are encoded using two independent LSTM networks and then a matching score is calculated using a match LSTM network. The result is identified based on the matching scores for a plurality of candidate predicates. The pretrained word embeddings allow for knowledge transfer since pretrained word embeddings in one intent domain can apply to another intent domain without retraining.
MATCHING BASED INTENT UNDERSTANDING WITH TRANSFER LEARNING