Publications

Speech disfluencies have been hypothesized to occur before words that are less predictable and therefore more cognitively demanding. In this paper, we revisit this hypothesis by using OpenAI’s GPT-2 to calculate predictability of words as language model perplexity. Using the Switchboard corpus, we find that 51% of disfluencies occur at the highest, second highest, or within one token of the highest perplexity

We describe an unsupervised method to create pseudo-parallel corpora for machine translation (MT) from unaligned text. We use multilingual BERT to create source and target sentence embeddings for nearest-neighbor search and adapt the model via self-training. We validate our technique by extracting parallel sentence pairs on the BUCC 2017 bitext mining task and observe up to a 24.5-point increase (absolute

Currently, in spoken language understanding (SLU) systems, the automatic speech recognition (ASR) module produces multiple interpretations (or hypotheses) for the input audio signal and the natural language understanding (NLU) module takes the one with the highest confidence score for domain or intent classification. However, the interpretations can be noisy, and solely relying on one interpretation can

This paper addresses the question as to what degree a BERT-based multilingual Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) model can transfer knowledge across languages. Through experiments we will show that, although it works substantially well even on distant language groups, there is still a gap to the ideal multilingual performance. In addition, we propose a novel BERT-based adversarial model architecture to

Misspellings are introduced on products either due to negligence or as an attempt to deliberately deceive stakeholders. This leads to a revenue loss for online sellers and fosters customer mistrust. Existing spelling research has primarily focused on advancement in misspelling correction and the approach for misspelling detection has remained the use of a large dictionary. The dictionary lookup results

Short text classification is a fundamental problem in natural language processing, social network analysis, and e-commerce. The lack of structure in short text sequences limits the success of popular NLP methods based on deep learning. Simpler methods that rely on bag-of-words representations tend to perform on par with complex deep learning methods. To tackle the limitations of textual features in short

It has been shown that knowledge graph embeddings encode potentially harmful social biases, such as the information that women are more likely to be nurses, and men more likely to be bankers. As graph embeddings begin to be used more widely in NLP pipelines, there is a need to develop training methods which remove such biases. Previous approaches to this problem both significantly increase the training

Multilingual BERT (mBERT) has shown reasonable capability for zero-shot cross-lingual transfer when fine-tuned on downstream tasks. Since mBERT is not pre-trained with explicit cross-lingual supervision, transfer performance can further be improved by aligning mBERT with cross-lingual signal. Prior work proposes several approaches to align contextualised embeddings. In this paper we analyse how different

Modern conversational AI systems support natural language understanding for a wide variety of capabilities. While a majority of these tasks can be accomplished using a simple and flat representation of intents and slots, more sophisticated capabilities require complex hierarchical representations supported by semantic parsing. State-of-the-art semantic parsers are trained using supervised learning with data

Unsupervised domain adaptation addresses the problem of leveraging labeled data in a source domain to learn a well-performing model in a target domain where labels are unavailable. In this paper, we improve upon a recent theoretical work (Zhang et al., 2019b) and adopt the Margin Disparity Discrepancy (MDD) unsupervised domain adaptation algorithm to solve the cross-lingual text labeling problems. Experiments

Neural Architecture Search (NAS) methods, which automatically learn entire neural model or individual neural cell architectures, have recently achieved competitive or state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on a variety of natural language processing and computer vision tasks, including language modeling, natural language inference, and image classification. In this work, we explore the applicability of a SOTA

Collecting training data for semantic parsing is a time-consuming and expensive task. As a result, there is growing interest in industry to reduce the number of annotations required to train a semantic parser, both to cut down on costs and to limit customer data handled by annotators. In this paper, we propose uncertainty and traffic-aware active learning, a novel active learning method that uses model

Pretrained language models have excelled at many NLP tasks recently; however, their social intelligence is still unsatisfactory. To enable this, machines need to have a more general understanding of our complicated world and develop the ability to perform commonsense reasoning besides fitting the specific downstream tasks. External commonsense knowledge graphs (KGs), such as ConceptNet, provide rich information

The ability of machine translation (MT) models to correctly place markup is crucial to generating high-quality translations of formatted input. This paper compares two commonly used methods of representing markup tags and tests the ability of MT models to learn tag placement via training data augmentation. We study the interactions of tag representation, data augmentation size, tag complexity, and language

In pursuit of the perfect supervised NLP classifier, razor thin margins and low-resource test-sets can make modeling decisions difficult. Popular metrics such as Accuracy, Precision, and Recall are often insufficient as they fail to give a complete picture of the model’s behavior. We present a probabilistic extension of Precision, Recall, and F1 score, which we refer to as confidence-Precision (cPrecision