11 research outputs found
Spoken Language Intent Detection using Confusion2Vec
Decoding speaker's intent is a crucial part of spoken language understanding
(SLU). The presence of noise or errors in the text transcriptions, in real life
scenarios make the task more challenging. In this paper, we address the spoken
language intent detection under noisy conditions imposed by automatic speech
recognition (ASR) systems. We propose to employ confusion2vec word feature
representation to compensate for the errors made by ASR and to increase the
robustness of the SLU system. The confusion2vec, motivated from human speech
production and perception, models acoustic relationships between words in
addition to the semantic and syntactic relations of words in human language. We
hypothesize that ASR often makes errors relating to acoustically similar words,
and the confusion2vec with inherent model of acoustic relationships between
words is able to compensate for the errors. We demonstrate through experiments
on the ATIS benchmark dataset, the robustness of the proposed model to achieve
state-of-the-art results under noisy ASR conditions. Our system reduces
classification error rate (CER) by 20.84% and improves robustness by 37.48%
(lower CER degradation) relative to the previous state-of-the-art going from
clean to noisy transcripts. Improvements are also demonstrated when training
the intent detection models on noisy transcripts
Confusion2vec 2.0: Enriching Ambiguous Spoken Language Representations with Subwords
Word vector representations enable machines to encode human language for
spoken language understanding and processing. Confusion2vec, motivated from
human speech production and perception, is a word vector representation which
encodes ambiguities present in human spoken language in addition to semantics
and syntactic information. Confusion2vec provides a robust spoken language
representation by considering inherent human language ambiguities. In this
paper, we propose a novel word vector space estimation by unsupervised learning
on lattices output by an automatic speech recognition (ASR) system. We encode
each word in confusion2vec vector space by its constituent subword character
n-grams. We show the subword encoding helps better represent the acoustic
perceptual ambiguities in human spoken language via information modeled on
lattice structured ASR output. The usefulness of the proposed Confusion2vec
representation is evaluated using semantic, syntactic and acoustic analogy and
word similarity tasks. We also show the benefits of subword modeling for
acoustic ambiguity representation on the task of spoken language intent
detection. The results significantly outperform existing word vector
representations when evaluated on erroneous ASR outputs. We demonstrate that
Confusion2vec subword modeling eliminates the need for retraining/adapting the
natural language understanding models on ASR transcripts
End-to-End Speech to Intent Prediction to improve E-commerce Customer Support Voicebot in Hindi and English
Automation of on-call customer support relies heavily on accurate and
efficient speech-to-intent (S2I) systems. Building such systems using
multi-component pipelines can pose various challenges because they require
large annotated datasets, have higher latency, and have complex deployment.
These pipelines are also prone to compounding errors. To overcome these
challenges, we discuss an end-to-end (E2E) S2I model for customer support
voicebot task in a bilingual setting. We show how we can solve E2E intent
classification by leveraging a pre-trained automatic speech recognition (ASR)
model with slight modification and fine-tuning on small annotated datasets.
Experimental results show that our best E2E model outperforms a conventional
pipeline by a relative ~27% on the F1 score.Comment: Accepted at EMNLP 2022 Industry Trac