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Voice-controlled AI dialogue systems are susceptible to noise from phonetic variations and failure to resolve ambiguous entities. Typically, personalized entity resolution (ER) and/or query rewrites (QR) are deployed to recover from these error modes. Previous work in this field achieves personalization by constraining retrieval search space to personalized indices built from user&#39;s historical interactions with the device. While constrained retrieval achieves high precision, predictions are limited to entities in recent user history, which offers low coverage of future requests. Further, maintaining individual indices for millions of users is memory intensive and difficult to scale. In this work, we propose a personalized entity retrieval system that is robust to phonetic noise and ambiguity but is not limited to a personalized index. We achieve this by embedding user listening preferences into a contextual query embedding used in retrieval. We demonstrate our model&#39;s ability to correct multiple error modes and show 91% improvement over baseline on the entity retrieval task. Finally, we optimize the end-to-end approach to fit within online latency constraints while maintaining gains in performance.

EMNLP 2023

Personalized Dense Retrieval on Global Index for Voice-enabled Conversational Systems

conversaional ai

entity retrieval

personalization

Voice-controlled AI dialogue systems are susceptible to noise from phonetic variations and failure to resolve ambiguous entities. Typically, personalized entity resolution (ER) and/or query rewrites (QR) are deployed to recover from these error modes. Previous work in this field achieves personalization by constraining retrieval search space to personalized indices built from user's historical interactions with the device. While constrained retrieval achieves high precision, predictions are limited to entities in recent user history, which offers low coverage of future requests. Further, maintaining individual indices for millions of users is memory intensive and difficult to scale. In this work, we propose a personalized entity retrieval system that is robust to phonetic noise and ambiguity but is not limited to a personalized index. We achieve this by embedding user listening preferences into a contextual query embedding used in retrieval. We demonstrate our model's ability to correct multiple error modes and show 91% improvement over baseline on the entity retrieval task. Finally, we optimize the end-to-end approach to fit within online latency constraints while maintaining gains in performance.

technical paper

**Welcome to EMNLP 2023!**

On behalf of the EMNLP 2023 Organizing Committee, I extend a warm and heartfelt welcome to all of you to the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP). It is with immense pleasure and excitement that we gather here in Singapore, a vibrant hub of innovation and technological advancement.

The conference program is packed with insightful presentations, thought-provoking workshops, and engaging networking opportunities. In addition to the technical sessions, we have also planned several social events that will provide you with the opportunity to connect with your colleagues.

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Yuji Matsumoto (RIKEN AIP) 
EMNLP 2023 General Chair

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EMNLP 2023 took place in Singapore from Dec 6th to Dec 10th, 2023.

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Query-aware Multi-modal based Ranking Relevance in Video Search

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Relevance-assisted Generation for Robust Zero-shot Retrieval

Product matching is the task of matching a seller-listed item to an appropriate product. It is a critical task for an e-commerce platform, and the approach needs to be efficient to run in a large-scale setting. A dual encoder approach has been a common practice for product matching recently, due to its high performance and computation efficiency. In this paper, we propose a two-stage training for the dual encoder model. Stage 1 trained a dual encoder to identify the more informative training data. Stage 2 then train on the more informative data to get a better dual encoder model. This technique is a learned approach for building training data. We evaluate the retrieval-enhanced training on two different datasets: a publicly available Large-Scale Product Matching dataset and a real-world e-commerce dataset containing 47 million products. Experiment results show that our approach improved by 2% F1 on the public dataset and 9% F1 on the real-world e-commerce dataset.

Retrieval-Enhanced Dual Encoder Training for Product Matching

Personalization of automatic speech recognition (ASR) models is a widely studied topic because of its many practical applications. Most recently, attention-based contextual biasing techniques are used to improve the recognition of rare words and/or domain specific entities. However, due to performance constraints, the biasing is often limited to a few thousand entities, restricting real-world usability. To address this, we first propose a "Retrieve and Copy" mechanism to improve latency while retaining the accuracy even when scaled to a large catalog. We also propose a training strategy to overcome the degradation in recall at such scale due to an increased number of confusing entities. Overall, our approach achieves up to 6% more Word Error Rate reduction (WERR) and 3.6% absolute improvement in F1 when compared to a strong baseline. Our method also allows for large catalog sizes of up to 20K without significantly affecting WER and F1-scores, while achieving at least 20% inference speedup per acoustic frame.

Retrieve and Copy: Scaling ASR Personalization to Large Catalogs

The latest industrial inference engines, such as FasterTransformer and TurboTransformers, have verified that half-precision floating point (FP16) and 8-bit integer (INT8) quantization can greatly improve model inference speed. However, the existing INT8 quantization methods are too complicated, and improper usage will lead to model performance damage greatly. In this paper, we develop a toolkit for users to easily quantize their models for inference, in which Self-Adaptive Mixed-Precision (SAMP) is proposed to automatically control quantization rate by a mixed-precision architecture to balance model accuracy and efficiency. Experimental results show that our SAMP toolkit has a higher speedup than PyTorch and FasterTransformer while ensuring the required accuracy. In addition, SAMP is based on a modular design, decoupling the tokenizer, embedding, encoder and target layers, which allows users to handle various downstream tasks and can be seamlessly integrated into PyTorch.

SAMP: A Model Inference Toolkit of Post-Training Quantization for Text Processing via Self-Adaptive Mixed-Precision | VIDEO

ITN involves rewriting the verbalised form of text from spoken transcripts to its corresponding written form. The task inherently expects challenges in identifying ITN entries due to spelling variations in words arising out of dialects, transcription errors etc. Additionally, in Tamil, word boundaries between adjacent words in a sentence often get obscured due to Punarchi, i.e. phonetic transformation of these boundaries. Being morphologically rich, the words in Tamil show a high degree of agglutination due to inflection and clitics. The combination of such factors leads to a high degree of surface-form variations, making scalability with pure rule-based approaches difficult. Instead, we experiment with fine-tuning three pre-trained neural LMs, consisting of a seq2seq model (s2s), a non-autoregressive text editor (NAR) and a sequence tagger + rules combination (tagger). While the tagger approach works best in a fully-supervised setting, s2s performs the best (98.05 F-Score) when augmented with additional data, via bootstrapping and data augmentation (DA&B). S2S reports a cumulative percentage improvement of 20.1 %, and statistically significant gains for all our models with DA&B. Compared to a fully supervised setup, bootstrapping alone reports a percentage improvement as high as 14.12 %, even with a small seed set of 324 ITN entries.

Scaling Neural ITN for Numbers and Temporal Expressions in Tamil: Findings for an Agglutinative Low-resource Language | VIDEO

We present Speakerly, a new real-time voice-based writing assistance system that helps users with text composition across various use cases such as emails, instant messages, and notes. The user can interact with the system through instructions or dictation, and the system generates a well-formatted and coherent document. We describe the system architecture and detail how we address the various challenges while building and deploying such a system at scale. More specifically, our system uses a combination of small, task-specific models as well as pre-trained language models for fast and effective text composition while supporting a variety of input modes for better usability.

Speakerly: A Voice-based Writing Assistant for Text Composition

In the context of a voice assistant system, steering refers to the phenomenon in which a user issues a follow-up command attempting to direct or clarify a previous turn. We propose STEER, a steering detection model that predicts whether a follow-up turn is a user's attempt to steer the previous command. Constructing a training dataset for steering use cases poses challenges due to the cold-start problem. To overcome this, we developed heuristic rules to sample opt-in usage data, approximating positive and negative samples without any annotation. Our experimental results show promising performance in identifying steering intent, with over 95% accuracy on our sampled data. Moreover, STEER, in conjunction with our sampling strategy, aligns effectively with real-world steering scenarios, as evidenced by its strong zero-shot performance on a human-graded evaluation set. In addition to relying solely on user transcripts as input, we introduce STEER+, an enhanced version of the model. STEER+ utilizes a semantic parse tree to provide more context on out-of-vocabulary words, such as named entities that often occur at the sentence boundary. This further improves model performance, reducing error rate in domains where entities frequently appear, such as messaging. Lastly, we present a data analysis that highlights the improvement in user experience when voice assistants support steering use cases.

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Product question answering (PQA) aims to provide an instant response to customer questions posted on shopping message boards, social media, brand websites and retail stores. In this paper, we propose a distantly supervised solution to answer customer questions by using product information. Auto-answering questions using product information poses two main challenges:(i) labelled data is not readily available (ii)lengthy product information requires attending to various parts of the text to answer the question. To this end, we first propose a novel distant supervision based NLI model to prepare training data without any manual efforts. To deal with lengthy context, we factorize answer generation into two sub-problems. First, given product information, model extracts evidence spans relevant to question. Then, model leverages evidence spans to generate answer. Further, we propose two novelties in fine-tuning approach: (i) First, we jointly fine-tune model for both the tasks in end-to-end manner and showcase that it outperforms standard multi-task fine-tuning. (ii) Next, we introduce an auxiliary contrastive loss for evidence extraction. We show that combination of these two ideas achieves an absolute improvement of 6% in accuracy (human evaluation) over baselines.

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Query-aware Multi-modal based Ranking Relevance in Video Search

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