Karthik Raghunathan

Sai Muralidhar Jayanthi, Varsha Embar, Karthik Raghunathan

The wide applicability of pretrained transformer models (PTMs) for natural language tasks is well demonstrated, but their ability to comprehend short phrases of text is less explored. To this end, we evaluate different PTMs from the lens of unsupervised Entity Linking in task-oriented dialog across 5 characteristics -- syntactic, semantic, short-forms, numeric and phonetic. Our results demonstrate that several of the PTMs produce sub-par results when compared to traditional techniques, albeit competitive to other neural baselines. We find that some of their shortcomings can be addressed by using PTMs fine-tuned for text-similarity tasks, which illustrate an improved ability in comprehending semantic and syntactic correspondences, as well as some improvements for short-forms, numeric and phonetic variations in entity mentions. We perform qualitative analysis to understand nuances in their predictions and discuss scope for further improvements. Code can be found at https://github.com/murali1996/el_tod

Varsha Embar, Ritvik Shrivastava, Vinay Damodaran et al.

Large Language Models have transformed the Contact Center industry, manifesting in enhanced self-service tools, streamlined administrative processes, and augmented agent productivity. This paper delineates our system that automates call driver generation, which serves as the foundation for tasks such as topic modeling, incoming call classification, trend detection, and FAQ generation, delivering actionable insights for contact center agents and administrators to consume. We present a cost-efficient LLM system design, with 1) a comprehensive evaluation of proprietary, open-weight, and fine-tuned models and 2) cost-efficient strategies, and 3) the corresponding cost analysis when deployed in production environments.

Konstantin Kolokolov, Pavel Pekichev, Karthik Raghunathan

We introduce a novel neural network module that adeptly handles recursive data flow in neural network architectures. At its core, this module employs a self-consistent approach where a set of recursive equations is solved iteratively, halting when the difference between two consecutive iterations falls below a defined threshold. Leveraging this mechanism, we construct a new neural network architecture, an extension of the conformer transducer, which enriches automatic speech recognition systems with a stream of contextual information. Our method notably improves the accuracy of recognizing rare words without adversely affecting the word error rate for common vocabulary. We investigate the improvement in accuracy for these uncommon words using our novel model, both independently and in conjunction with shallow fusion with a context language model. Our findings reveal that the combination of both approaches can improve the accuracy of detecting rare words by as much as 4.5 times. Our proposed self-consistent recursive methodology is versatile and adaptable, compatible with many recently developed encoders, and has the potential to drive model improvements in speech recognition and beyond.