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Alexa teacher model: Pretraining and distilling multi-billion-parameter encoders for natural language understanding systems

By Jack G. M. FitzGerald, Shankar Ananthakrishnan, Konstantine Arkoudas, Davide Bernardi, Abhishek Bhagia, Claudio Delli Bovi, Jin Cao, Rakesh Chada, Amit Chauhan, Luoxin Chen, Anurag Dwarakanath, Satyam Dwivedi, Turan Gojayev, Karthik Gopalakrishnan, Thomas Gueudre, Dilek Hakkani-Tür, Wael Hamza, Jonathan Hueser, Kevin Martin Jose, Haidar Khan, Beiye Liu, Jianhua Lu, Alessandro Manzotti, Pradeep Natarajan, Karolina Owczarzak, Gokmen Oz, Enrico Palumbo, Charith Peris, Chandana Satya Prakash, Stephen Rawls, Andy Rosenbaum, Anjali Shenoy, Saleh Soltan, Mukund Harakere, Liz Tan, Fabian Triefenbach, Pan WEI, Haiyang Yu, Shuai Zheng, Gokhan Tur, Prem Natarajan
2022
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We present results from a large-scale experiment on pretraining encoders with non-embedding parameter counts ranging from 700M to 9.3B, their subsequent distillation into smaller models ranging from 17M-170M parameters, and their application to the Natural Language Understanding (NLU) component of a virtual assistant system. Though we train using 70% spoken-form data, our teacher models perform comparably to XLM-R and mT5 when evaluated on the written-form Cross-lingual Natural Language Inference (XNLI) corpus. We perform a second stage of pretraining on our teacher models using in-domain data from our system, improving error rates by 3.86% relative for intent classification and 7.01% relative for slot filling. We find that even a 170M-parameter model distilled from our Stage 2 teacher model has 2.88% better intent classification and 7.69% better slot filling error rates when compared to the 2.3B-parameter teacher trained only on public data (Stage 1), emphasizing the importance of in-domain data for pretraining. When evaluated offline using labeled NLU data, our 17M-parameter Stage 2 distilled model outperforms both XLM-R Base (85M params) and DistillBERT (42M params) by 4.23% to 6.14%, respectively. Finally, we present results from a full virtual assistant experimentation platform, where we find that models trained using our pretraining and distillation pipeline outperform models distilled from 85M parameter teachers by 3.74%-4.91% on an automatic measurement of full-system user dissatisfaction.
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