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Spoken Language Understanding (SLU), a core component of the task-oriented dialogue system, expects a shorter inference latency due to the impatience of humans. Non-autoregressive SLU models clearly increase the inference speed but suffer…
Customer service chatbots are conversational systems aimed at addressing customer queries, often by directing them to automated workflows. A crucial aspect of this process is the classification of the customer's intent. Presently, most…
End-to-end spoken language understanding (SLU) systems benefit from pretraining on large corpora, followed by fine-tuning on application-specific data. The resulting models are too large for on-edge applications. For instance, BERT-based…
Spoken dialog systems are slowly becoming and integral part of the human experience due to their various advantages over textual interfaces. Spoken language understanding (SLU) systems are fundamental building blocks of spoken dialog…
This paper presents a production Semi-Supervised Learning (SSL) pipeline based on the student-teacher framework, which leverages millions of unlabeled examples to improve Natural Language Understanding (NLU) tasks. We investigate two…
Most recent progress in natural language understanding (NLU) has been driven, in part, by benchmarks such as GLUE, SuperGLUE, SQuAD, etc. In fact, many NLU models have now matched or exceeded "human-level" performance on many tasks in these…
User interaction with voice-powered agents generates large amounts of unlabeled utterances. In this paper, we explore techniques to efficiently transfer the knowledge from these unlabeled utterances to improve model performance on Spoken…
Learning intents and slot labels from user utterances is a fundamental step in all spoken language understanding (SLU) and dialog systems. State-of-the-art neural network based methods, after deployment, often suffer from performance…
Natural language understanding (NLU) converts sentences into structured semantic forms. The paucity of annotated training samples is still a fundamental challenge of NLU. To solve this data sparsity problem, previous work based on…
Traditional slot filling in natural language understanding (NLU) predicts a one-hot vector for each word. This form of label representation lacks semantic correlation modelling, which leads to severe data sparsity problem, especially when…
Natural Language Understanding (NLU) is a core component of dialog systems. It typically involves two tasks - intent classification (IC) and slot labeling (SL), which are then followed by a dialogue management (DM) component. Such NLU…
The goal of spoken language understanding (SLU) systems is to determine the meaning of the input speech signal, unlike speech recognition which aims to produce verbatim transcripts. Advances in end-to-end (E2E) speech modeling have made it…
Transformer-based pretrained language models (PLMs) offer unmatched performance across the majority of natural language understanding (NLU) tasks, including a body of question answering (QA) tasks. We hypothesize that improvements in QA…
Spoken language understanding (SLU) refers to the process of inferring the semantic information from audio signals. While the neural transformers consistently deliver the best performance among the state-of-the-art neural architectures in…
A major focus of recent research in spoken language understanding (SLU) has been on the end-to-end approach where a single model can predict intents directly from speech inputs without intermediate transcripts. However, this approach…
We present NLU++, a novel dataset for natural language understanding (NLU) in task-oriented dialogue (ToD) systems, with the aim to provide a much more challenging evaluation environment for dialogue NLU models, up to date with the current…
Goal-oriented dialogue systems typically communicate with a backend (e.g. database, Web API) to complete certain tasks to reach a goal. The intents that a dialogue system can recognize are mostly included to the system by the developer…
Background: The adoption of chatbots into software development tasks has become increasingly popular among practitioners, driven by the advantages of cost reduction and acceleration of the software development process. Chatbots understand…
Task-oriented dialogue systems use four connected modules, namely, Natural Language Understanding (NLU), a Dialogue State Tracking (DST), Dialogue Policy (DP) and Natural Language Generation (NLG). A research challenge is to learn each…
End-to-end spoken language understanding (SLU) systems have many advantages over conventional pipeline systems, but collecting in-domain speech data to train an end-to-end system is costly and time consuming. One question arises from this:…