Customer-obsessed science

Recent work has unveiled how average generalization frequently relies on superficial patterns in data. The consequences are brittle models with poor performance in the presence of domain shift in group distribution at test time. When the subgroups in the training data are known, we can use tools from robust optimization to tackle the problem. However, group annotation and identification are time-consuming

End-to-end automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems are increasingly popular due to their relative architectural simplicity and competitive performance. However, even though the average accuracy of these systems may be high, the performance on rare content words often lags behind hybrid ASR systems. To address this problem, second-pass rescoring is often applied leveraging upon language modeling (LM).

Multi-source entity linkage focuses on integrating knowledge from multiple sources by linking the records that represent the same real world entity. This is critical in high-impact applications such as data cleaning and user stitching. The state-of-the-art entity linkage pipelines mainly depend on supervised learning that requires abundant amounts of training data. However, collecting well-labeled training

Identifying discriminative attributes between product variations, e.g., the same wristwatch models but in different finishes, is crucial for improving e-commerce search engines and recommender systems. Despite the importance of these discriminative attributes, values for such attributes are often not available explicitly and instead are mentioned only in unstructured fields such as product title or product

In open-domain question answering, questions are highly likely to be ambiguous because users may not know the scope of relevant topics when formulating them. Therefore, a system needs to find possible interpretations of the question, and predict one or multiple plausible answers. When multiple plausible answers are found, the system should rewrite the question for each answer to resolve the ambiguity. In