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Recent progress through advanced neural models pushed the performance of task-oriented dialog systems to almost perfect accuracy on existing benchmark datasets for intent classification and slot labeling. However, in evolving real-world dialog systems, where new functionality is regularly added, a major additional challenge is the lack of annotated training data for such new functionality, as the necessary data collection efforts are laborious and time-consuming. A potential solution to reduce the effort is to augment initial seed data by paraphrasing existing utterances automatically. In this paper, we propose a new, data-efficient approach following this idea. Using an interpretation-to-text model for paraphrase generation, we are able to rely on existing dialog system training data, and, in combination with shuffling-based sampling techniques, we can obtain diverse and novel paraphrases from small amounts of seed data. In experiments on a public dataset and with a real-world dialog system, we observe improvements for both intent classification and slot labeling, demonstrating the usefulness of our approach.

COLING 2020

Data-Efficient Paraphrase Generation to Bootstrap Intent Classification
and Slot Labeling for New Features in Task-Oriented Dialog Systems

stages 

COLING, the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, is one of the premier conferences for natural language processing and computational linguistics. Often grouped within the field of artificial intelligence, but actually pre-dating the development of artificial intelligence, advances in computational linguistics and natural language processing are now some of the major drivers behind the use of artificial intelligence for commercial and social applications – for example, on-line search, machine translation and with voice-assisted conversational devices.

First established in 1965, the biennial COLING conference is held in diverse parts of the globe and attracts participants from both top-ranked research centers and emerging countries. Today, the most important developments in our field are taking place not only in universities and academic research institutes, but also in industrial research departments and in technological startups. COLING conferences provide opportunities for all these communities to showcase their exciting developments.

COLING, the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, is one of the premier conferences for natural language processing and computational linguistics. Often grouped within the field of artificial intelligence, but actually pre-dating the development of artificial intelligence, advances in computational linguistics and natural language processing are now some of the major drivers behind the use of artificial intelligence for commercial and social applications – for example, on-line search, machine translation and with voice-assisted conversational devices.

technical paper

In spoken language understanding (SLU) systems, the automatic speech recognition (ASR) module produces multiple interpretations (or hypotheses) for the input audio signal and the natural language understanding (NLU) module takes the one with the highest confidence score for domain or intent classification. However, the interpretations can be noisy and solely relying on one interpretation can cause information loss. To address the problem, many research works attempt to rerank the interpretations for a better choice while some recent works get a better performance by integrating all the hypotheses during prediction. In this work, we follow the way of integrating hypotheses but strengthen the training mode by involving more tasks, some of which may be not in existing tasks of NLU but relevant, via multi-task learning or transfer learning. Moreover, we propose the Hierarchical Attention Mechanism (HAM) to further improve the performance with the acoustic-model features like confidence scores, which are ignored in the current hypotheses integration models.

Multi-task Learning of Spoken Language Understanding by Integrating N-Best Hypotheses with Hierarchical Attention

Misspellings are introduced on products either due to negligence or as an attempt to deliberately deceive stakeholders. This leads to a revenue loss for online sellers and fosters customer mistrust. Existing spelling research has primarily focused on advancement in misspelling correction and the approach for misspelling detection has remained the use of a large dictionary. The dictionary lookup results in the incorrect detection of several non-dictionary words as misspellings. In this paper, we propose a method to automatically detect misspellings from product images in an attempt to reduce false positive detections. We curate a large scale corpus, define a rich set of features and propose a novel model that leverages importance weighting to account for within class distributional variance. Finally, we experimentally validate this approach on both the curated corpus and an out-of-domain public dataset and show that it leads to a relative improvement of up to 20% in F1 score. The approach thus creates a more robust, generalized deployable solution and reduces reliance on large scale custom dictionaries used today.

Misspelling Detection from Noisy Product Images

We present hinglishNorm - a human annotated corpus of Hindi-English code-mixed sentences for text normalization task. Each sentence in the corpus is aligned to its corresponding human annotated normalized form. To the best of our knowledge, there is no corpus of Hindi-English code-mixed sentences for text normalization task that is publicly available. Our work is the first attempt in this direction. The corpus contains 13494 segments annotated for text normalization. Further, we present baseline normalization results on this corpus. We obtain a Word Error Rate (WER) of 15.55, BiLingual Evaluation Understudy (BLEU) score of 71.2, and Metric for Evaluation of Translation with Explicit ORdering (METEOR) score of 0.50.

hinglishNorm - A Corpus of Hindi-English Code Mixed Sentences for Text Normalization

While neural approaches have achieved significant improvement in machine comprehension tasks, models often work as a black-box, resulting in lower interpretability, which requires special attention in domains such as healthcare or education. Quantifying uncertainty helps pave the way towards more interpretable neural networks. In classification and regression tasks, Bayesian neural networks have been effective in estimating model uncertainty. However, inference time increases linearly due to the required sampling process in Bayesian neural networks. Thus speed becomes a bottleneck in tasks with high system complexity such as question-answering or dialogue generation. In this work, we propose a hybrid neural architecture to quantify model uncertainty using Bayesian weight approximation but boosts up the inference speed by 80% relative at test time, and apply it for a clinical dialogue comprehension task. The proposed approach is also used to enable active learning so that an updated model can be trained more optimally with new incoming data by selecting samples that are not well-represented in the current training scheme.

Uncertainty Modeling for Machine Comprehension Systems using Efficient Bayesian Neural Networks

Organisations are monitoring their Social License to Operate (SLO) with increasing regularity.SLO, the level of support organisations gain from the public, is typically assessed through surveys or focus groups, which require expensive manual efforts and yield quickly-outdated results. In this paper, we present SIRTA (Social Insight via real-Time Text Analytics), a novel real-time text analytics system for assessing and monitoring organisations’ SLO levels by analysing the public discourse from social posts. To assess SLO levels, our insight is to extract and transform peoples’ stances towards an organisation into SLO levels. SIRTA achieves this by performing a chain of three text classification tasks, where it identifies task-relevant social posts, discovers keySLO risks discussed in the posts, and infers stances specific to the SLO risks. We leverage recent language understanding techniques (e.g., BERT) for building our classifiers. To monitor SLOlevels over time, SIRTA employs quality control mechanisms to reliably identify SLO trends and variations of multiple organisations in a market. These are derived from the smoothed time series of their SLO levels based on exponentially-weighted moving average (EWMA) calculation. Our experimental results show that SIRTA is highly effective in distilling stances from social posts for SLO level assessment and that the continuous monitoring of SLO levels afforded by SIRTAenables the early detection of critical SLO changes.

Assessing Social License to Operate from the Public Discourse on Social Media

In large-scale commercial dialog systems, users express the same request in a wide variety of alternative ways with a long tail of less frequent alternatives. Handling the full range of this distribution is challenging, in particular when relying on manual annotations. However, the same users also provide useful implicit feedback as they often paraphrase an utterance if the dialog system failed to understand it. We propose MARUPA, a method to leverage this type of feedback by creating annotated training examples from it. MARUPA creates new data in a fully automatic way, without manual intervention or effort from annotators, and specifically for currently failing utterances. By re-training the dialog system on this new data, accuracy and coverage for long-tail utterances can be improved. In experiments, we study the effectiveness of this approach in a commercial dialog system across various domains and three languages.

Leveraging User Paraphrasing Behavior In Dialog Systems To Automatically Collect Annotations For Long-Tail Utterances

Recent years have witnessed substantial progress in the development of neural ranking networks, but also an increasingly heavy computational burden due to growing numbers of parameters and the adoption of model ensembles. Knowledge Distillation (KD) is a common solution to balance the effectiveness and efficiency. However, it is not straightforward to apply KD to ranking problems. Ranking Distillation (RD) has been proposed to address this issue, but only shows effectiveness on recommendation tasks. We present a novel two-stage distillation method for ranking problems that allows a smaller student model to be trained while benefitting from the better performance of the teacher model, providing better control of the inference latency and computational burden. We design a novel BERT-based ranking model structure for list-wise ranking to serve as our student model. All ranking candidates are fed to the BERT model simultaneously, such that the self-attention mechanism can enable joint inference to rank the document list. Our experiments confirm the advantages of our method, not just with regard to the inference latency but also in terms of higher-quality rankings compared to the original teacher model.

Query Distillation: BERT-based Distillation for Ensemble Ranking

Embedding-based entity alignment has been widely investigated in recent years, but most pro- posed methods still rely on an ideal supervised learning setting with a large number of unbiased seed mappings for training and validation, which significantly limits their usage. In this study, we evaluate those state-of-the-art methods in an industrial context, where the impact of seed map- pings with different sizes and different biases is explored. Besides the popular benchmarks from DBpedia and Wikidata, we contribute and evaluate a new industrial benchmark that is extracted from two heterogeneous knowledge graphs (KGs) under deployment for medical applications. The experimental results enable the analysis of the advantages and disadvantages of these alignment methods and the further discussion of suitable strategies for their industrial deployment.

An Industry Evaluation of Embedding-based Entity Alignment

The topic of this presentation is neural multi-task training for text style transfer. We present an efficient method for neutral-to-style transformation using the transformer framework. We demonstrate how to prepare a robust model utilizing large paraphrases corpora together with a small parallel style transfer corpus. We study how much style transfer data is needed for a model on the example of two transformations: neutral-to-cute on internal corpus and modern-to-antique on
publicly available Bible corpora. Additionally, we propose a synthetic measure for the automatic evaluation of style transfer models. We hope our research is a step towards replacing common but limited rule-based style transfer systems by more flexible machine learning models for both public and commercial usage.

An Empirical Study on Multi-Task Learning for Text Style Transfer and Paraphrase Generation

Natural language generation (NLG) is a critical component in conversational systems, owing to its role of formulating a correct and natural text response. Traditionally, NLG components have been deployed using template-based solutions. Although neural network solutions recently developed in the research community have been shown to provide several benefits, deployment of such model-based solutions has been challenging due to high latency, correctness issues, and high data needs. In this paper, we present approaches that have helped us deploy data-efficient neural solutions for NLG in conversational systems to production. We describe a family of sampling and modeling techniques to attain production quality with light-weight neural network models using only a fraction of the data that would be necessary otherwise, and show a thorough comparison between each. Our results show that domain complexity dictates the appropriate approach to achieve high data efficiency. Finally, we distill the lessons from our experimental findings into a list of best practices for production-level NLG model development, and present them in a brief runbook. Importantly, the end products of all of the techniques are small sequence-to-sequencemodels (~2Mb) that we can reliably deploy in production.

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