Related papers: Iterative Delexicalization for Improved Spoken Lan…

Natural language understanding (NLU) has two core tasks: intent classification and slot filling. The success of pre-training language models resulted in a significant breakthrough in the two tasks. One of the promising solutions called BERT…

Recently, with the help of deep learning models, significant advances have been made in different Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. Unfortunately, state-of-the-art models are vulnerable to noisy texts. We propose a new contextual…

Natural language understanding typically maps single utterances to a dual level semantic frame, sentence level intent and slot labels at the word level. The best performing models force explicit interaction between intent detection and slot…

It is expensive and difficult to obtain the large number of sentence-level intent and token-level slot label annotations required to train neural network (NN)-based Natural Language Understanding (NLU) components of task-oriented dialog…

Time-frequency analysis is an important and challenging task in many applications. Fourier and wavelet analysis are two classic methods that have achieved remarkable success in many fields. However, they also exhibit limitations when…

Compared to traditional statistical machine translation (SMT), neural machine translation (NMT) often sacrifices adequacy for the sake of fluency. We propose a method to combine the advantages of traditional SMT and NMT by exploiting an…

Intent classification and slot filling are two critical tasks for natural language understanding. Traditionally the two tasks proceeded independently. However, more recently joint models for intent classification and slot filling have…

Standard Recurrent Neural Network Transducers (RNN-T) decoding algorithms for speech recognition are iterating over the time axis, such that one time step is decoded before moving on to the next time step. Those algorithms result in a large…

Dealing with previously unseen slots is a challenging problem in a real-world multi-domain dialogue state tracking task. Other approaches rely on predefined mappings to generate candidate slot keys, as well as their associated values. This,…

Neural machine translation (NMT) heavily relies on word-level modelling to learn semantic representations of input sentences. However, for languages without natural word delimiters (e.g., Chinese) where input sentences have to be tokenized…

Deep-learning models for language generation tasks tend to produce repetitive output. Various methods have been proposed to encourage lexical diversity during decoding, but this often comes at a cost to the perceived fluency and adequacy of…

Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) typically comprises of an automatic speech recognition (ASR) followed by a natural language understanding (NLU) module. The two modules process signals in a blocking sequential fashion, i.e., the NLU…

Current researches on spoken language understanding (SLU) heavily are limited to a simple setting: the plain text-based SLU that takes the user utterance as input and generates its corresponding semantic frames (e.g., intent and slots).…

Lexical normalisation (LN) is the process of correcting each word in a dataset to its canonical form so that it may be more easily and more accurately analysed. Most lexical normalisation systems operate at the character-level, while…

Many efforts have been devoted to training generative latent variable models with autoregressive decoders, such as recurrent neural networks (RNN). Stochastic recurrent models have been successful in capturing the variability observed in…

The recurrent neural network transducer (RNN-T) has recently become the mainstream end-to-end approach for streaming automatic speech recognition (ASR). To estimate the output distributions over subword units, RNN-T uses a fully connected…

Improving distant speech recognition is a crucial step towards flexible human-machine interfaces. Current technology, however, still exhibits a lack of robustness, especially when adverse acoustic conditions are met. Despite the significant…

The success of many natural language processing (NLP) tasks is bound by the number and quality of annotated data, but there is often a shortage of such training data. In this paper, we ask the question: "Can we combine a neural network (NN)…

Deep learning based methods hold state-of-the-art results in low-level image processing tasks, but remain difficult to interpret due to their black-box construction. Unrolled optimization networks present an interpretable alternative to…

This paper presents a novel evaluation approach to text-based speaker diarization (SD), tackling the limitations of traditional metrics that do not account for any contextual information in text. Two new metrics are proposed, Text-based…