English

Error Detection in Large-Scale Natural Language Understanding Systems Using Transformer Models

Computation and Language 2021-09-07 v1 Artificial Intelligence Machine Learning

Abstract

Large-scale conversational assistants like Alexa, Siri, Cortana and Google Assistant process every utterance using multiple models for domain, intent and named entity recognition. Given the decoupled nature of model development and large traffic volumes, it is extremely difficult to identify utterances processed erroneously by such systems. We address this challenge to detect domain classification errors using offline Transformer models. We combine utterance encodings from a RoBERTa model with the Nbest hypothesis produced by the production system. We then fine-tune end-to-end in a multitask setting using a small dataset of humanannotated utterances with domain classification errors. We tested our approach for detecting misclassifications from one domain that accounts for <0.5% of the traffic in a large-scale conversational AI system. Our approach achieves an F1 score of 30% outperforming a bi- LSTM baseline by 16.9% and a standalone RoBERTa model by 4.8%. We improve this further by 2.2% to 32.2% by ensembling multiple models.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2109.01754,
  title  = {Error Detection in Large-Scale Natural Language Understanding Systems Using Transformer Models},
  author = {Rakesh Chada and Pradeep Natarajan and Darshan Fofadiya and Prathap Ramachandra},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2109.01754},
  year   = {2021}
}

Comments

Accepted to ACL Findings 2021

R2 v1 2026-06-24T05:40:31.377Z