Zero-Shot Slot and Intent Detection in Low-Resource Languages

Intent detection and slot filling are critical tasks in spoken and natural language understanding for task-oriented dialog systems. In this work we describe our participation in the slot and intent detection for low-resource language varieties (SID4LR; Aepli et al. (2023)). We investigate the slot and intent detection (SID) tasks using a wide range of models and settings. Given the recent success of multitask-prompted finetuning of large language models, we also test the generalization capability of the recent encoder-decoder model mT0 (Muennighoff et al., 2022) on new tasks (i.e., SID) in languages they have never intentionally seen. We show that our best model outperforms the baseline by a large margin (up to +30 F1 points) in both SID tasksComment: VarDial @ EAC

Towards End-to-End spoken intent recognition in smart home

International audienceVoice based interaction in a smart home has become a feature of many industrial products. These systems react to voice commands, whether it is for answering a question, providing music or turning on the lights. To be efficient, these systems must be able to extract the intent of the user from the voice command. Intent recognition from voice is typically performed through automatic speech recognition (ASR) and intent classification from the transcriptions in a pipeline. However, the errors accumulated at the ASR stage might severely impact the intent classifier. In this paper, we propose an End-to-End (E2E) model to perform intent classification directly from the raw speech input. The E2E approach is thus optimized for this specific task and avoids error propagation. Furthermore, prosodic aspects of the speech signal can be exploited by the E2E model for intent classification (e.g., question vs imperative voice). Experiments on a corpus of voice commands acquired in a real smart home reveal that the state-of-the art pipeline baseline is still superior to the E2E approach. However, using artificial data generation techniques we show that significant improvement to the E2E model can be brought to reach competitive performances. This opens the way to further research on E2E Spoken Language Understanding