Chenlei Guo

Niranjan Uma Naresh, Ziyan Jiang, Ankit et al. · amazon-science

Conversational understanding is an integral part of modern intelligent devices. In a large fraction of the global traffic from customers using smart digital assistants, frictions in dialogues may be attributed to incorrect understanding of the entities in a customer's query due to factors including ambiguous mentions, mispronunciation, background noise and faulty on-device signal processing. Such errors are compounded by two common deficiencies from intelligent devices namely, (1) the device not being tailored to individual customers, and (2) the device responses being unaware of the context in the conversation session. Viewing this problem via the lens of retrieval-based search engines, we build and evaluate a scalable entity correction system, PENTATRON. The system leverages a parametric transformer-based language model to learn patterns from in-session customer-device interactions coupled with a non-parametric personalized entity index to compute the correct query, which aids downstream components in reasoning about the best response. In addition to establishing baselines and demonstrating the value of personalized and context-aware systems, we use multitasking to learn the domain of the correct entity. We also investigate the utility of language model prompts. Through extensive experiments, we show a significant upward movement of the key metric (Exact Match) by up to 500.97% (relative to the baseline).

Jinglun Cai, Mingda Li, Ziyan Jiang et al. · amazon-science

Query Rewriting (QR) plays a critical role in large-scale dialogue systems for reducing frictions. When there is an entity error, it imposes extra challenges for a dialogue system to produce satisfactory responses. In this work, we propose KG-ECO: Knowledge Graph enhanced Entity COrrection for query rewriting, an entity correction system with corrupt entity span detection and entity retrieval/re-ranking functionalities. To boost the model performance, we incorporate Knowledge Graph (KG) to provide entity structural information (neighboring entities encoded by graph neural networks) and textual information (KG entity descriptions encoded by RoBERTa). Experimental results show that our approach yields a clear performance gain over two baselines: utterance level QR and entity correction without utilizing KG information. The proposed system is particularly effective for few-shot learning cases where target entities are rarely seen in training or there is a KG relation between the target entity and other contextual entities in the query.

Md Mofijul Islam, Gustavo Aguilar, Pragaash Ponnusamy et al.

Subword tokenization is a commonly used input pre-processing step in most recent NLP models. However, it limits the models' ability to leverage end-to-end task learning. Its frequency-based vocabulary creation compromises tokenization in low-resource languages, leading models to produce suboptimal representations. Additionally, the dependency on a fixed vocabulary limits the subword models' adaptability across languages and domains. In this work, we propose a vocabulary-free neural tokenizer by distilling segmentation information from heuristic-based subword tokenization. We pre-train our character-based tokenizer by processing unique words from multilingual corpus, thereby extensively increasing word diversity across languages. Unlike the predefined and fixed vocabularies in subword methods, our tokenizer allows end-to-end task learning, resulting in optimal task-specific tokenization. The experimental results show that replacing the subword tokenizer with our neural tokenizer consistently improves performance on multilingual (NLI) and code-switching (sentiment analysis) tasks, with larger gains in low-resource languages. Additionally, our neural tokenizer exhibits a robust performance on downstream tasks when adversarial noise is present (typos and misspelling), further increasing the initial improvements over statistical subword tokenizers.

Xu Han, Bin Guo, Yoon Jung et al.

Personalized dialogue agents (DAs) powered by large pre-trained language models (PLMs) often rely on explicit persona descriptions to maintain personality consistency. However, such descriptions may not always be available or may pose privacy concerns. To tackle this bottleneck, we introduce PersonaPKT, a lightweight transfer learning approach that can build persona-consistent dialogue models without explicit persona descriptions. By representing each persona as a continuous vector, PersonaPKT learns implicit persona-specific features directly from a small number of dialogue samples produced by the same persona, adding less than 0.1% trainable parameters for each persona on top of the PLM backbone. Empirical results demonstrate that PersonaPKT effectively builds personalized DAs with high storage efficiency, outperforming various baselines in terms of persona consistency while maintaining good response generation quality. In addition, it enhances privacy protection by avoiding explicit persona descriptions. Overall, PersonaPKT is an effective solution for creating personalized DAs that respect user privacy.

Pragaash Ponnusamy, Clint Solomon Mathialagan, Gustavo Aguilar et al.

Self-learning paradigms in large-scale conversational AI agents tend to leverage user feedback in bridging between what they say and what they mean. However, such learning, particularly in Markov-based query rewriting systems have far from addressed the impact of these models on future training where successive feedback is inevitably contingent on the rewrite itself, especially in a continually updating environment. In this paper, we explore the consequences of this inherent lack of self-awareness towards impairing the model performance, ultimately resulting in both Type I and II errors over time. To that end, we propose augmenting the Markov Graph construction with a superposition-based adjacency matrix. Here, our method leverages an induced stochasticity to reactively learn a locally-adaptive decision boundary based on the performance of the individual rewrites in a bi-variate beta setting. We also surface a data augmentation strategy that leverages template-based generation in abridging complex conversation hierarchies of dialogs so as to simplify the learning process. All in all, we demonstrate that our self-aware model improves the overall PR-AUC by 27.45%, achieves a relative defect reduction of up to 31.22%, and is able to adapt quicker to changes in global preferences across a large number of customers.

Ruolin Su, Zhongkai Sun, Sixing Lu et al.

Recent advances in cross-lingual commonsense reasoning (CSR) are facilitated by the development of multilingual pre-trained models (mPTMs). While mPTMs show the potential to encode commonsense knowledge for different languages, transferring commonsense knowledge learned in large-scale English corpus to other languages is challenging. To address this problem, we propose the attention-based Cross-LIngual Commonsense Knowledge transfER (CLICKER) framework, which minimizes the performance gaps between English and non-English languages in commonsense question-answering tasks. CLICKER effectively improves commonsense reasoning for non-English languages by differentiating non-commonsense knowledge from commonsense knowledge. Experimental results on public benchmarks demonstrate that CLICKER achieves remarkable improvements in the cross-lingual CSR task for languages other than English.

Doyoung Kim, Zhiwei Ren, Jie Hao et al.

We introduce WildAGTEval, a benchmark designed to evaluate large language model (LLM) agents' function-calling capabilities under realistic API complexity. Unlike prior work that assumes an idealized API system and disregards real-world factors such as noisy API outputs, WildAGTEval accounts for two dimensions of real-world complexity: 1. API specification, which includes detailed documentation and usage constraints, and 2. API execution, which captures runtime challenges. Consequently, WildAGTEval offers (i) an API system encompassing 60 distinct complexity scenarios that can be composed into approximately 32K test configurations, and (ii) user-agent interactions for evaluating LLM agents on these scenarios. Using WildAGTEval, we systematically assess several advanced LLMs and observe that most scenarios are challenging, with irrelevant information complexity posing the greatest difficulty and reducing the performance of strong LLMs by 27.3%. Furthermore, our qualitative analysis reveals that LLMs occasionally distort user intent merely to claim task completion, critically affecting user satisfaction.

Yichuan Li, Xiyao Ma, Sixing Lu et al.

Large Language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive in-context learning (ICL) capabilities, where a LLM makes predictions for a given test input together with a few input-output pairs (demonstrations). Nevertheless, the inclusion of demonstrations leads to a quadratic increase in the computational overhead of the self-attention mechanism. Existing solutions attempt to distill lengthy demonstrations into compact vectors. However, they often require task-specific retraining or compromise LLM's in-context learning performance. To mitigate these challenges, we present Meta dEmonstratioN Distillation (MEND), where a language model learns to distill any lengthy demonstrations into vectors without retraining for a new downstream task. We exploit the knowledge distillation to enhance alignment between MEND and LLM, achieving both efficiency and effectiveness simultaneously. MEND is endowed with the meta-knowledge of distilling demonstrations through a two-stage training process, which includes meta-distillation pretraining and fine-tuning. Comprehensive evaluations across seven diverse ICL task partitions using decoder-only (GPT-2) and encoder-decoder (T5) attest to MEND's prowess. It not only matches but often outperforms the Vanilla ICL as well as other state-of-the-art distillation models, while significantly reducing the computational demands. This innovation promises enhanced scalability and efficiency for the practical deployment of large language models

Zhongkai Sun, Sixing Lu, Chengyuan Ma et al.

Voice assistants such as Alexa, Siri, and Google Assistant have become increasingly popular worldwide. However, linguistic variations, variability of speech patterns, ambient acoustic conditions, and other such factors are often correlated with the assistants misinterpreting the user's query. In order to provide better customer experience, retrieval based query reformulation (QR) systems are widely used to reformulate those misinterpreted user queries. Current QR systems typically focus on neural retrieval model training or direct entities retrieval for the reformulating. However, these methods rarely focus on query expansion and entity weighting simultaneously, which may limit the scope and accuracy of the query reformulation retrieval. In this work, we propose a novel Query Expansion and Entity Weighting method (QEEW), which leverages the relationships between entities in the entity catalog (consisting of users' queries, assistant's responses, and corresponding entities), to enhance the query reformulation performance. Experiments on Alexa annotated data demonstrate that QEEW improves all top precision metrics, particularly 6% improvement in top10 precision, compared with baselines not using query expansion and weighting; and more than 5% improvement in top10 precision compared with other baselines using query expansion and weighting.

Ruixue Lian, Che-Wei Huang, Yuqing Tang et al.

Individual user profiles and interaction histories play a significant role in providing customized experiences in real-world applications such as chatbots, social media, retail, and education. Adaptive user representation learning by utilizing user personalized information has become increasingly challenging due to ever-growing history data. In this work, we propose an incremental user embedding modeling approach, in which embeddings of user's recent interaction histories are dynamically integrated into the accumulated history vectors via a transformer encoder. This modeling paradigm allows us to create generalized user representations in a consecutive manner and also alleviate the challenges of data management. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach by applying it to a personalized multi-class classification task based on the Reddit dataset, and achieve 9% and 30% relative improvement on prediction accuracy over a baseline system for two experiment settings through appropriate comment history encoding and task modeling.

Haoran Xu, Sixing Lu, Zhongkai Sun et al.

Text Style Transfer (TST) aims to alter the underlying style of the source text to another specific style while keeping the same content. Due to the scarcity of high-quality parallel training data, unsupervised learning has become a trending direction for TST tasks. In this paper, we propose a novel VAE based Text Style Transfer with pivOt Words Enhancement leaRning (VT-STOWER) method which utilizes Variational AutoEncoder (VAE) and external style embeddings to learn semantics and style distribution jointly. Additionally, we introduce pivot words learning, which is applied to learn decisive words for a specific style and thereby further improve the overall performance of the style transfer. The proposed VT-STOWER can be scaled to different TST scenarios given very limited and non-parallel training data with a novel and flexible style strength control mechanism. Experiments demonstrate that the VT-STOWER outperforms the state-of-the-art on sentiment, formality, and code-switching TST tasks.

Kaize Ding, Dingcheng Li, Alexander Hanbo Li et al.

Paraphrase generation is a longstanding NLP task that has diverse applications for downstream NLP tasks. However, the effectiveness of existing efforts predominantly relies on large amounts of golden labeled data. Though unsupervised endeavors have been proposed to address this issue, they may fail to generate meaningful paraphrases due to the lack of supervision signals. In this work, we go beyond the existing paradigms and propose a novel approach to generate high-quality paraphrases with weak supervision data. Specifically, we tackle the weakly-supervised paraphrase generation problem by: (1) obtaining abundant weakly-labeled parallel sentences via retrieval-based pseudo paraphrase expansion; and (2) developing a meta-learning framework to progressively select valuable samples for fine-tuning a pre-trained language model, i.e., BART, on the sentential paraphrasing task. We demonstrate that our approach achieves significant improvements over existing unsupervised approaches, and is even comparable in performance with supervised state-of-the-arts.

Yunmo Chen, Sixing Lu, Fan Yang et al.

Query rewriting (QR) systems are widely used to reduce the friction caused by errors in a spoken language understanding pipeline. However, the underlying supervised models require a large number of labeled pairs, and these pairs are hard and costly to be collected. Therefore, We propose an augmentation framework that learns patterns from existing training pairs and generates rewrite candidates from rewrite labels inversely to compensate for insufficient QR training data. The proposed framework casts the augmentation problem as a sequence-to-sequence generation task and enforces the optimization process with a policy gradient technique for controllable rewarding. This approach goes beyond the traditional heuristics or rule-based augmentation methods and is not constrained to generate predefined patterns of swapping/replacing words. Our experimental results show its effectiveness compared with a fully trained QR baseline and demonstrate its potential application in boosting the QR performance on low-resource domains or locales.

Alireza Roshan-Ghias, Clint Solomon Mathialagan, Pragaash Ponnusamy et al.

Spoken language understanding (SLU) systems in conversational AI agents often experience errors in the form of misrecognitions by automatic speech recognition (ASR) or semantic gaps in natural language understanding (NLU). These errors easily translate to user frustrations, particularly so in recurrent events e.g. regularly toggling an appliance, calling a frequent contact, etc. In this work, we propose a query rewriting approach by leveraging users' historically successful interactions as a form of memory. We present a neural retrieval model and a pointer-generator network with hierarchical attention and show that they perform significantly better at the query rewriting task with the aforementioned user memories than without. We also highlight how our approach with the proposed models leverages the structural and semantic diversity in ASR's output towards recovering users' intents.

Zheng Chen, Xing Fan, Yuan Ling et al.

Query rewriting (QR) is an increasingly important technique to reduce customer friction caused by errors in a spoken language understanding pipeline, where the errors originate from various sources such as speech recognition errors, language understanding errors or entity resolution errors. In this work, we first propose a neural-retrieval based approach for query rewriting. Then, inspired by the wide success of pre-trained contextual language embeddings, and also as a way to compensate for insufficient QR training data, we propose a language-modeling (LM) based approach to pre-train query embeddings on historical user conversation data with a voice assistant. In addition, we propose to use the NLU hypotheses generated by the language understanding system to augment the pre-training. Our experiments show pre-training provides rich prior information and help the QR task achieve strong performance. We also show joint pre-training with NLU hypotheses has further benefit. Finally, after pre-training, we find a small set of rewrite pairs is enough to fine-tune the QR model to outperform a strong baseline by full training on all QR training data.

Pragaash Ponnusamy, Alireza Roshan Ghias, Chenlei Guo et al.

Today, most large-scale conversational AI agents (e.g. Alexa, Siri, or Google Assistant) are built using manually annotated data to train the different components of the system. Typically, the accuracy of the ML models in these components are improved by manually transcribing and annotating data. As the scope of these systems increase to cover more scenarios and domains, manual annotation to improve the accuracy of these components becomes prohibitively costly and time consuming. In this paper, we propose a system that leverages user-system interaction feedback signals to automate learning without any manual annotation. Users here tend to modify a previous query in hopes of fixing an error in the previous turn to get the right results. These reformulations, which are often preceded by defective experiences caused by errors in ASR, NLU, ER or the application. In some cases, users may not properly formulate their requests (e.g. providing partial title of a song), but gleaning across a wider pool of users and sessions reveals the underlying recurrent patterns. Our proposed self-learning system automatically detects the errors, generate reformulations and deploys fixes to the runtime system to correct different types of errors occurring in different components of the system. In particular, we propose leveraging an absorbing Markov Chain model as a collaborative filtering mechanism in a novel attempt to mine these patterns. We show that our approach is highly scalable, and able to learn reformulations that reduce Alexa-user errors by pooling anonymized data across millions of customers. The proposed self-learning system achieves a win/loss ratio of 11.8 and effectively reduces the defect rate by more than 30% on utterance level reformulations in our production A/B tests. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first self-learning large-scale conversational AI system in production.

Gustavo Aguilar, Yuan Ling, Yu Zhang et al.

Knowledge distillation is typically conducted by training a small model (the student) to mimic a large and cumbersome model (the teacher). The idea is to compress the knowledge from the teacher by using its output probabilities as soft-labels to optimize the student. However, when the teacher is considerably large, there is no guarantee that the internal knowledge of the teacher will be transferred into the student; even if the student closely matches the soft-labels, its internal representations may be considerably different. This internal mismatch can undermine the generalization capabilities originally intended to be transferred from the teacher to the student. In this paper, we propose to distill the internal representations of a large model such as BERT into a simplified version of it. We formulate two ways to distill such representations and various algorithms to conduct the distillation. We experiment with datasets from the GLUE benchmark and consistently show that adding knowledge distillation from internal representations is a more powerful method than only using soft-label distillation.