Related papers: SQATIN: Supervised Instruction Tuning Meets Questi…
Slot labeling (SL) is a core component of task-oriented dialogue (ToD) systems, where slots and corresponding values are usually language-, task- and domain-specific. Therefore, extending the system to any new language-domain-task…
Natural Language Understanding (NLU) is a branch of Natural Language Processing (NLP) that uses intelligent computer software to understand texts that encode human knowledge. Recent years have witnessed notable progress across various NLU…
In real-world task-oriented dialogue (TOD) settings, agents are required to strictly adhere to complex instructions while conducting multi-turn conversations with customers. These instructions are typically presented in natural language…
In recent years, fostered by deep learning technologies and by the high demand for conversational AI, various approaches have been proposed that address the capacity to elicit and understand user's needs in task-oriented dialogue systems.…
Recent years have seen significant advances in end-to-end (E2E) spoken language understanding (SLU) systems, which directly predict intents and slots from spoken audio. While dialogue history has been exploited to improve conventional…
Large language models (LLMs) are widely used as general-purpose knowledge sources, but they rely on parametric knowledge, limiting explainability and trustworthiness. In task-oriented dialogue (TOD) systems, this separation is explicit,…
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…
Transformer-based approaches have been successfully used to obtain state-of-the-art accuracy on natural language processing (NLP) tasks with semi-structured tables. These model architectures are typically deep, resulting in slow training…
Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) consists of two sub-tasks: intent detection (ID) and slot filling (SF). Given its broad range of real-world applications, enhancing SLU for practical deployment is increasingly critical. Profile-based SLU…
Pre-trained multilingual language models show significant performance gains for zero-shot cross-lingual model transfer on a wide range of natural language understanding (NLU) tasks. Previously, for zero-shot cross-lingual evaluation,…
The standard task-oriented dialogue pipeline uses intent classification and slot-filling to interpret user utterances. While this approach can handle a wide range of queries, it does not extract the information needed to handle more complex…
Task-oriented dialogue is often decomposed into three tasks: understanding user input, deciding actions, and generating a response. While such decomposition might suggest a dedicated model for each sub-task, we find a simple, unified…
For natural language understanding (NLU) technology to be maximally useful, both practically and as a scientific object of study, it must be general: it must be able to process language in a way that is not exclusively tailored to any one…
Test-time domain adaptation (TTDA) is an excellent method which helps generalize models across domains, tasks, and distributions without the use of labeled datasets. Thus, TTDA is very useful in natural language processing (NLP) in the…
Non-task oriented dialogue systems have achieved great success in recent years due to largely accessible conversation data and the development of deep learning techniques. Given a context, current systems are able to yield a relevant and…
Existing conversational systems are mostly agent-centric, which assumes the user utterances would closely follow the system ontology (for NLU or dialogue state tracking). However, in real-world scenarios, it is highly desirable that the…
The latency in the current neural based dialogue state tracking models prohibits them from being used efficiently for deployment in production systems, albeit their highly accurate performance. This paper proposes a new scalable and…
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).…
Pretrained language models (PLMs) trained on large-scale unlabeled corpus are typically fine-tuned on task-specific downstream datasets, which have produced state-of-the-art results on various NLP tasks. However, the data discrepancy issue…
Ontology-based approach to the Natural Language Understanding (NLU) processing allows to improve questions answering quality in dialogue systems. We describe our NLU engine architecture and evaluate its implementation. The engine transforms…