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Register a new userExploiting Sentence and Context Representations in Deep Neural Models for Spoken Language Understanding
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Added by
Lina Rojas-Barahona
Publication date
2016
fields
Informatics Engineering
and research's language is
English
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This paper presents a deep learning architecture for the semantic decoder component of a Statistical Spoken Dialogue System. In a slot-filling dialogue, the semantic decoder predicts the dialogue act and a set of slot-value pairs from a set of n-best hypotheses returned by the Automatic Speech Recognition. Most current models for spoken language understanding assume (i) word-aligned semantic annotations as in sequence taggers and (ii) delexicalisation, or a mapping of input words to domain-specific concepts using heuristics that try to capture morphological variation but that do not scale to other domains nor to language variation (e.g., morphology, synonyms, paraphrasing ). In this work the semantic decoder is trained using unaligned semantic annotations and it uses distributed semantic representation learning to overcome the limitations of explicit delexicalisation. The proposed architecture uses a convolutional neural network for the sentence representation and a long-short term memory network for the context representation. Results are presented for the publicly available DSTC2 corpus and an In-car corpus which is similar to DSTC2 but has a significantly higher word error rate (WER).
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The distributed and continuous representations used by neural networks are at odds with representations employed in linguistics, which are typically symbolic. Vector quantization has been proposed as a way to induce discrete neural representations that are closer in nature to their linguistic counterparts. However, it is not clear which metrics are the best-suited to analyze such discrete representations. We compare the merits of four commonly used metrics in the context of weakly supervised models of spoken language. We compare the results they show when applied to two different models, while systematically studying the effect of the placement and size of the discretization layer. We find that different evaluation regimes can give inconsistent results. While we can attribute them to the properties of the different metrics in most cases, one point of concern remains: the use of minimal pairs of phoneme triples as stimuli disadvantages larger discrete unit inventories, unlike metrics applied to complete utterances. Furthermore, while in general vector quantization induces representations that correlate with units posited in linguistics, the strength of this correlation is only moderate.
Computational context understanding refers to an agents ability to fuse disparate sources of information for decision-making and is, therefore, generally regarded as a prerequisite for sophisticated machine reasoning capabilities, such as in artificial intelligence (AI). Data-driven and knowledge-driven methods are two classical techniques in the pursuit of such machine sense-making capability. However, while data-driven methods seek to model the statistical regularities of events by making observations in the real-world, they remain difficult to interpret and they lack mechanisms for naturally incorporating external knowledge. Conversely, knowledge-driven methods, combine structured knowledge bases, perform symbolic reasoning based on axiomatic principles, and are more interpretable in their inferential processing; however, they often lack the ability to estimate the statistical salience of an inference. To combat these issues, we propose the use of hybrid AI methodology as a general framework for combining the strengths of both approaches. Specifically, we inherit the concept of neuro-symbolism as a way of using knowledge-bases to guide the learning progress of deep neural networks. We further ground our discussion in two applications of neuro-symbolism and, in both cases, show that our systems maintain interpretability while achieving comparable performance, relative to the state-of-the-art.
End-to-end Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) models are made increasingly large and complex to achieve the state-ofthe-art accuracy. However, the increased complexity of a model can also introduce high risk of over-fitting, which is a major challenge in SLU tasks due to the limitation of available data. In this paper, we propose an attention-based SLU model together with three encoder enhancement strategies to overcome data sparsity challenge. The first strategy focuses on the transferlearning approach to improve feature extraction capability of the encoder. It is implemented by pre-training the encoder component with a quantity of Automatic Speech Recognition annotated data relying on the standard Transformer architecture and then fine-tuning the SLU model with a small amount of target labelled data. The second strategy adopts multitask learning strategy, the SLU model integrates the speech recognition model by sharing the same underlying encoder, such that improving robustness and generalization ability. The third strategy, learning from Component Fusion (CF) idea, involves a Bidirectional Encoder Representation from Transformer (BERT) model and aims to boost the capability of the decoder with an auxiliary network. It hence reduces the risk of over-fitting and augments the ability of the underlying encoder, indirectly. Experiments on the FluentAI dataset show that cross-language transfer learning and multi-task strategies have been improved by up to 4:52% and 3:89% respectively, compared to the baseline.
Conventional spoken language translation (SLT) systems are pipeline based systems, where we have an Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) system to convert the modality of source from speech to text and a Machine Translation (MT) systems to translate source text to text in target language. Recent progress in the sequence-sequence architectures have reduced the performance gap between the pipeline based SLT systems (cascaded ASR-MT) and End-to-End approaches. Though End-to-End and cascaded ASR-MT systems are reaching to the comparable levels of performances, we can see a large performance gap using the ASR hypothesis and oracle text w.r.t MT models. This performance gap indicates that the MT systems are prone to large performance degradation due to noisy ASR hypothesis as opposed to oracle text transcript. In this work this degradation in the performance is reduced by creating an end to-end differentiable pipeline between the ASR and MT systems. In this work, we train SLT systems with ASR objective as an auxiliary loss and both the networks are connected through the neural hidden representations. This train ing would have an End-to-End differentiable path w.r.t to the final objective function as well as utilize the ASR objective for better performance of the SLT systems. This architecture has improved from BLEU from 36.8 to 44.5. Due to the Multi-task training the model also generates the ASR hypothesis which are used by a pre-trained MT model. Combining the proposed systems with the MT model has increased the BLEU score by 1. All the experiments are reported on English-Portuguese speech translation task using How2 corpus. The final BLEU score is on-par with the best speech translation system on How2 dataset with no additional training data and language model and much less parameters.
In a modern spoken language understanding (SLU) system, the natural language understanding (NLU) module takes interpretations of a speech from the automatic speech recognition (ASR) module as the input. The NLU module usually uses the first best interpretation of a given speech in downstream tasks such as domain and intent classification. However, the ASR module might misrecognize some speeches and the first best interpretation could be erroneous and noisy. Solely relying on the first best interpretation could make the performance of downstream tasks non-optimal. To address this issue, we introduce a series of simple yet efficient models for improving the understanding of semantics of the input speeches by collectively exploiting the n-best speech interpretations from the ASR module.
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